If life was a GIF, the perfect routine!

Ernest sitting on bench

Over the years my physical relationship with my body has grown to include mental and emotional wellness, this perspective has become an important role in creating and maintaining my inner happiness. It definitely has a strong opinionated voice in my head commenting and questioning my actions or lack thereof.

At this point in time you must be asking yourself, how does this relate to a GIF?!

Well let me elaborate on that. For those of us who were around in the late 90s, we know that GIFs are nothing new – yes, I’m telling my age right now 37 going on 38 a few weeks. The internet, IMs and memes have brought back to life what was the beginning of animation and it’s definitely a unique flavor.

Open up your favorite GIF, one that makes you laugh every time you see it… you see it now don’t you? THAT is the definition of a perfect routine (~.^)

Now, let’s take that perfect repetition and implement it into our sleep schedule, work schedule, exercise, study, social and family time. You get the picture don’t you, we have created the perfect life right? …. WRONG, unfortunately it isn’t that easy, well at least for me it isn’t. 

Life isn’t a perfect GIF that we can repeat day in and day out, hence the saying “life happens”

I don’t mean this as a valid excuse to not get things done, it’s actually quite the opposite. It’s about being prepared for the eventuality that when we make the best of plans with the greatest of intentions it’s very rare that everything will play out exactly as we planned it and that’s okay 🙂

So then, what should we be doing?

Everything we possibly can control to build and keep our daily routines on track, which brings me to the real focus on my blog post 😛

We are in the very beginning of the year, this is a very good time to reorganize our daily routines and make improvements wherever possible. Technology can be a great aid to accomplish this but relying on technology too much can also become a hindrance.

Over the next few blog posts I’m going to discuss “the idea” behind why I go through some rituals that I use and how I believe these rituals help me lining up my daily activities with my long term goals.

1. Writing down the Idea or Goal

I do believe this is definitely the most important step in achieving our goals, our brains are supercomputers and if you want to get something done you need to remove it from all the noise.

Writing the idea down definitely means putting a pen to paper, we want it out of the digital world and into the real world, this is the tangible aspect of “mentally creating a box” for the idea/goal. There are many amazing hacks out there that we can use to trick our own brains into better performing in line with our outcomes and this is a simple, yet very effective tool! 

Once you have written down the idea/goal you can look at it and expand on the idea or write more processes that should follow to continue to make this thought more of a reality. This is your mind on a paper, I would recommend not holding back! Just let your mind flow, some of the content might be nonsensical and less relevant but get it out and at a later stage you can begin a relevance filtering process.

After you’ve written down a few general pages on a topic, you start to have more confidence within yourself regarding the topic and from here I recommend you start sorting your thoughts in the form of a visual representation i.e. mind map or a different summarized visual representation of your thoughts of the subject at hand. Personally I have a big marker board that is right in front of my work area and this is one of its very many uses, I do enjoy writing things down… I’m just old school that way.

At this point in time I like to start talking about the idea with someone whom I trust, someone I know will have a positive outlook on my thoughts and support me in the right direction. This is another great mental hack, “sound boarding” … when we speak out our ideas verbally with the intent to explain, we ourselves gain better understanding of the processes required and you can use this process to continuously refine the visual representation… you get the idea, right? 

Let’s wrap this up: What I want you to take from this is that you have to bring your idea to life! Once your idea/goal is real to you, you will be willing to dedicate some of your precious daily time to continuously develop this idea.

Let me know in the comments below: 

What processes do you use to materialize your thoughts when you have an idea?
Do you know of any other simplified and effective visual representation methods? 

Next up, I’ll be talking about the good and bad aspects of using Calendars…

until the next time

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Any questions?

Whether you have a question about fitness, health or nutrition. I would be happy to help.
Personal Trainer health and fitness

Ernest Gaigulo

Personal Trainer & Nutrition Coach

I believe that through exercise we challenge ourselves not only physically but also mentally, developing a healthy relationship and outlook of your body and what you’re capable of doing is of the utmost importance, being able to accomplish something today that we couldn’t do yesterday feels great.

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