The power of rituals: how to use them for your benefit

Hands up if you love a good hack? ✋

Excellent, because I have a great one for you today!

About to sit for a difficult exam?
Or make a challenging client call?
Or feeling anxious before a complex project decision?

Well the good news is that having a ritual that you do beforehand lowers your anxiety and improves your performance.

First things first, let's define the word ritual as a predefined series of specific actions that have symbolic meaning, lacking any functional purpose.

The key elements:

• They must have symbolism, as in - have some deeper meaning for you.  Perhaps it could be tapping your palm on your heart, to remind you of all the love and support of your family. Or blowing imaginary bubbles of optimism that will expand and protect you from negativity. 

• They don't need any functional purpose, like say a piano player playing Rubik's cube to loosen and warm her fingers before a performance.
• It should be predefined, and ideally have repetitive elements, not something made up each time on the spot.

Ok, we know what a ritual is in this context, now let's bask in some example results from researchers from Harvard and Columbia university:

• Singers who performed a ritual performed 20% better (judged by tone analysis software) than those that sat quietly for the same time. 
• Those who performed a ritual before a math test performed 9% better than those that didn't.
• Performing rituals on average leads to 10% better performance than just doing random actions before the task at hand.

In short - rituals work!  And best of all, they are fast, free and fabulously easy to implement. 

Talk about a great hack 😂

Now, go ahead and schedule your ritual creation time!