The Role of Ritual

If we want to be better at anything, whether it be cooking, throwing darts, or leading people, we need more than new skills, we need to change our habits to apply those skills. And you can’t change a habit (which is our automatic response), without intention. But how do we ensure our intentionality?

With ritual.

While rituals can be societal or group based and are often connected to religion or beliefs (think marriages, baptisms, or bar/bat mitzahs), they can be more personal and not have a religious connection.

While changing habits require us to refine our intention and desire up front, rituals serve a bigger picture purpose. You could look at rituals as a mega-habit. In other words, rituals are a big picture activity; habits are the details.

According to Casper Ter Kulie in his book, The Power of Rituals: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices, rituals are created by:

• Intention. When we do something with intention, we have the first part of ritual.
• Attention. Something can become a ritual when the attention is paid to it. Ritual, to have real meaning, requires attention to the moment – and being present.
• Repetition. Doing something once might be intentional and you might be present – and it might be very memorable. Great moments or memories don’t make rituals (or make them powerful), repetition does.

Writing these blogs posts (in part for the Unleashing Your Remarkable Potential newsletter) is a ritual for me. As I write this, I have written an issue of that newsletter (and in about 99.5% of the cases a new blog post) for about 1,100 consecutive weeks. While writing new content each week is a task, it is more than that. Most weeks, I see it as more than a task, but as an important part of who I am and a connection of my work to my personal purpose and our organizational mission. It isn’t just a task; it is a ritual.

While much is written about building habits – and they are tremendously powerful – much less is written about ritual. Yet when we set our new habits on top of an intentional ritual, the chances for the new habit to take hold are greatly enhanced.

Note: this is adapted from a portion of one chapter in my book, Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead With Confidence.