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• Ritual: Something always done in a particular situation and in the same way each time. Merriam Webster
• Ritual: An established or prescribed procedure. Dictionary.com
• Ritual: A set of fixed actions and sometimes words performed regularly. Cambridge Dictionary
• Routine: A usual or fixed way of doing things.  Cambridge Dictionary
• Routine: A regular way of doing things in a particular order. Merriam Webster
• We use the word ‘ritual’ purposefully to emphasize the notion of a carefully defined, highly structured behavior.  Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
• Habit,  Effectiveness, Tradition

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Routines can help you to manage your energy

• Over the last couple of years, I’ve discovered the power of having simple routines, especially in the morning and evening. Having these routines can supercharge your day while simultaneously creating a sense of calm and sanity in your life. Leo Babauta
• All great performers rely on positive rituals to manage their energy and regulate their behavior. The more exacting the challenge and the greater the pressure, the more rigorous our rituals need to be. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
• Creating positive rituals is the most powerful means we have found to effectively manage energy in the service of full engagement. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
• The more scheduled and systematic these rituals became, the more renewal they provided. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
• The power of rituals is that they insure that we use as little conscious energy as possible where it is not absolutely necessary, leaving us free to strategically focus the energy available to us in creative, enriching ways. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
• Energy management

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Routines can support personal goals

• Instead of thinking about things in terms of one-off accomplishments, start to think about how you can break your goals down into small, consistent daily habits, and then start making those habits a part of your daily routine and just forget about them. Stever Robbins
• Goal setting

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Routine can free up creativity

• The most creative individuals–whether artists, businesspeople, or parents– have rituals that they follow. Paradoxically, the routine frees them up to be creative and spontaneous. Tal Ben-Shahar
• Creativity

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Routines can support habits

• Turn regular recurring tasks into habits. Bypass thinking and you bypass procrastination. Stever Robbins
• To modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consciously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits’ routines, and find alternatives. You must know you have control and be self- conscious enough to use it. Charles Duhigg
• The evidence is clear: If you want to change a habit, you must find an alternative routine. Charles Duhigg
• Habit

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Routines can aid self-discipline and will power

• People with good self-control mainly use it not for rescue in emergencies but rather to develop effective habits and routines in school and at work. Roy Baumeister
• We use the word ‘ritual’ purposefully to emphasize the notion of a carefully defined, highly structured behavior. In contrast to will and discipline, which require pushing yourself to a particular behavior, a ritual pulls at you. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
• Self-discipline,  Power

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Routines can create success

• You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine. John C. Maxwell
• Most of life is routine – dull and grubby, but routine is the momentum that keeps a man going. If you wait for inspiration, you’ll be standing on the corner after the parade is a mile down the street. Ben Nicholas
• The secret of your future is hidden in your daily routine. Mike Murdock
• The one common denominator of all successful people is a routine built on good habits. The most successful people in any field—the most successful athletes, lawyers, politicians, physicians, business leaders, musicians, and sales people, those who are the best at what they do have one thing in common: good habits. Jack D. Hodge
• Success

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Create routines and rituals that will make you happier

• For athletes, being a top performer is a deeply held value, and therefore they create rituals around training; for most people, hygiene is a deeply held value, and therefore they create the ritual of brushing their teeth. If we hold our personal happiness as a value and want to become happier, then we need to form rituals around that, too. Tal Ben- Shahar
• What rituals would make you happier? What would you like to introduce to your life? It could be working out three times a week, meditating for fifteen minutes every morning, watching two movies a month, going on a date with your spouse on Tuesdays, pleasure reading for an hour every other day, and so on. Introduce no more than one or two rituals at a time, and make sure they become habits before you introduce new ones. As Tony Schwartz says, ‘Incremental change is better than ambitious failure. Success feeds on itself.’ Tal Ben-Shahar
• Happiness

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Create healthy routines

• Instill healthy habits and routines into your daily life. Find ways to relax, relieve tension, and minimize stress. Allow time for self-care by practicing daily journaling, meditation, exercise or some other form of quiet time just for you where you can go to reflect, plan, relax and envision your day ahead. Eat healthy meals, drink plenty of water, get adequate rest, and take care of your personal hygiene. Give yourself a break every once in a while throughout the day to restore your natural state of harmony and calm and to rekindle your creativity. Structure your day to take advantage of your peak performance times. Natalie A. Gahrmann
• Health

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Create routines to start your day

• It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom. Aristotle
• Early morning is the most critical time of each day. How you spend the beginning hours of your day sets the stage for the remaining hours. If you purposefully establish a routine for spending your early morning as you want to, you will have taken a giant step toward spending the rest of your life the way you want to. Jack D. Hodge
• The way you start your day determines how well you live your day. Robin Sharma

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Create routines for unwinding before sleep

• Wind it down Give yourself time to unwind before bed. Develop a relaxing routine. Get any worrying or forward planning you have to do out of the way earlier in the day. Look for ways to make your life less stressful. Sarah Berry
• Sleep

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Create routines for reflection

• Reflection is the deliberate act of stepping back from daily habits and routines (without looming and immediate deadline pressures), either alone or within small and sequestered groups. It’s where meaning is derived through reconsideration of fundamental assumptions, the efficacy of past decisions and the consequences including the downside of future actions. It’s where space is given for the ‘totally unexpected’ to emerge. Daniel Patrick Forrester
• Make reflecting on your life a regular routine. Whether you keep a journal or make reflecting on your day part of your evening routine, or have a weekly session where you review your life or take some time away from the office to reflect on everything … it’s important that you give things some thought. Regularly. Leo Babauta
• Reflection

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Create routines for meditation

• It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky… a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe. Victor Hugo
• Meditation, movement, journaling, visualization. It’s hard to have a bad day with that start. Brian Johnson
• Meditation

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Create routines for exercise

• Exercise, but not too late. While physical activity is good for everyone, intense exercise — especially in the late afternoon and evening — can rev your body up and make sleeping at night difficult. So try a more moderate exercise routine and make sure to do it before the evening. Morgan Griffin
• Exercise

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Create negative rituals by eliminating negative habits

• In addition to creating a habit of activities that you want to engage in, introduce negative rituals—times during which you refrain from doing certain things. For example, create an Internet-free time zone, each day between certain hours. Tal Ben- Shahar
• Habit

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Take routines and turn them into mindfulness practice

• In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself. Eckhart Tolle
• Take routine activities and give them your full attention, being totally present. This is called Mindfulness. Eckhart Tolle
• Ritual is routine infused with mindfulness. It is habit made holy. Kent Nerburn
• Mindfulness

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Excessive routine can be harmful

• Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy. Henri de Lubac
• Routine is not organization, any more than paralysis is order. Arthur Helps

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Excessive routine creates a rut

• It is easy and comfortable to get into a routine in our lives. We take the same way to work, we see and talk to the same people every day, watch the same TV shows, read the same genre of literature, order the same items from the same restaurants. While routines aren’t inherently bad, if we aren’t careful our routines can become a rut that cuts us off from the rich experiences that life has to offer. Jason E. Marshall

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Excessive routine smothers adventure

• A man practices the art of adventure when he breaks the chain of routine and renews his life through reading new books, traveling to new places, making new friends, taking up new hobbies and adopting new viewpoints. Wilfred Peterson
• Because of our routines we forget that life is an ongoing adventure. Maya Angelou
• If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it is lethal. Paulo Coelho
• One of the gladdest moments of human life, me thinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy. Sir Richard Burton
• Adventure

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Excessive routine smothers excitement and aliveness

• I wasn’t losing my focus, but I was getting tired of focusing. What I was focusing on was becoming too routine, too ritual, not something that was interesting, new and exciting. Picabo Street
• As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge. Henry Van Dyke
• Life is routine, and routine is resistance to wonder. Abraham Joshua Heschel
• Life needs mystery or else everything else flattens into a routine so familiar you wonder if you will ever get out of the rut. We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive. Dave Kindred
• Excitement,  Vitality,  Being fully alive

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Excessive routine smothers self-awareness and growth

• The classical man is just a bundle of routine, ideas and tradition. If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow — you are not understanding yourself. Bruce Lee
• By changing the way you do routine things you allow a new man to grow inside you. Paulo Coelho
• Self-awareness,   Growth

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Excessive routine kills enjoyment and fun

• Don’t repeat things you enjoy in a routine way, which would make it a habit. Professor Wendy Wood
• Enjoyment,  Fun

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Excessive routine smothers innovation

• Organizations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation. Theodore Levitt
• Innovation

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Excessive routine smothers spontaneity

• Spontaneity is the quality of being able to do something just because you feel like it at the moment, of trusting your instincts, of taking yourself by surprise and snatching from the clutches of your well-organized routine, a bit of unscheduled pleasure. Richard Iannelli
• Spontaneity

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Excessive ritual smothers the beating heart of religion

• Any religion…is for ever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.   S. Eliot
• A prayer couched in the words of the soul, is far more powerful than any ritual. Paulo Coelho
• Don’t think you can attain total awareness and whole enlightenment without proper discipline and practice. This is egomania. Appropriate rituals channel your emotions and life energy toward the light. Without the discipline to practice them, you will tumble constantly backward into darkness. Lao Tzu
• Love and kindness are the basis of my religious beliefs. The rituals and outward signs are not as important as one’s actions and deeds. Religion should be a path to God, not something to fight about.  Bernie Siegel
• Many people conceive of religion as something apart from everyday affairs of the world. They think of it in terms of ceremony or ritual or sermons and often it strikes them as being dull or not particularly interesting.  Religion may be described in many ways.  I like to think of it as a medicine, a healing medicine for the mind.  Norman Vincent Peale
• Praying without ceasing is not ritualized, nor are there even words. It is a constant state of awareness of oneness with God. Peace Pilgrim
• Religion is not an end in itself. One’s union with God is the ultimate goal. There are so many religions because immature people tend to emphasize trivial differences instead of important likenesses. Differences between faiths lie in creeds and rituals rather than religious principles. Peace Pilgrim
• Religion

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Vary your routines to create aliveness in your life

• Pick a part of your life that’s become static, perhaps stale—such as cooking, a job, housework, repetitive parts of parenting, even sex—and really pursue ways to pep it up. Try new dishes, turn up the music, get goofy, dance with the baby, vary your routines, and so on. Rick Hanson
• The best cure for a sluggish mind is to disturb its routine. William H. Danforth
• Change your routine. Take a new route to work or order something completely different from the menu. It will raise your awareness about your immediate surroundings and create a new sense of place. Christine Louise Hohlbaum
• I want to caution you against the idea that balance has to be a routine that looks the same week in and week out. Kevin Thoman
• Being fully alive

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Vary your routines to spice up your relationships

• Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine. Honoré de Balzac
• Break through the ho-hum “I’m so bored” barrier that often plagues long-term relationships by learning something or doing something new together. Sharing activities of mutual interest is the glue that makes relationship work and create happiness.  Go ice skating, take a salsa lesson, rent rollerblades, go for a full moon hike, rent a bicycle built for two, or celebrate a milestone other than your anniversary—like the anniversary of the first day you made love.  It’s amazing what getting out of your normal routine and pushing your comfort boundaries will do for your love life.  Sheri Meyers
• Mix things up. Routines are par for the course in a long-term relationship. But you can easily break them! Doing new things together releases oxytocin in the brain, which is one of the chemicals that makes us feel all atwitter when a relationship is fresh. Try out new restaurants or take a day off to be with each other, Howes said. In other words, Zig where you usually zag once in a while.  Barton Goldsmith, Ph.D.
• Principles for healthy relationships

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