DW172: How to Bring Back Your Routines with Diane Rolston

Diane Rolston: 00:00:00

For many of us, now is the time that kids go back to school. Or at least if you're not a parent, you're thinking like summers winding down, I need to get back focused on my life, on my business and back to routines. If you don't know how to do that, then this episode is for you.

: 00:00:19

You're listening to the Dynamic Women podcast. Each week, you'll be inspired by our global community of women. They'll share with you tools and stories to help you be dynamic in every area of life. Here's your host, award-winning coach and the CEO and founder of Dynamic Women, Diane Rolston.

Diane Rolston: 00:00:48

Hello lovely dynamic women, and welcome to the Dynamic Women podcast. I'm Diane Rolston, your host, and today we're gonna talk about how do we get back into the swing of things and into our routines. How many of you are enjoying your summer? How many of you love vacation time? Or even just like long weekends or a day off? But then you're like, Ah, how do I get back to my regular routine when my routine has been so thrown off by summer or a vacation or being sick or COVID or surgery or supporting someone else? Right? List the billions of ways that our own routine gets thrown off. And you know, you want to get back to things. So this was a question that was asked in my Dynamic Women community.

Diane Rolston: 00:01:34

And I want you to think about first, like what is your routine? What are the things that when you're off of routine you want to get back to? I'm going to list some of the things that I've heard from my clients as we're ending summer. A lot of them have said to me, how do I get back to my routine? I want to, you know, start September strong. And for the moms, dads, parents, caregivers out there, you're like, soon as the kids get back to school, I'm gonna get myself back into my routine. So ask yourself, what are your things, let me go through right now, might be sleeping, right? Going to bed at a certain time. It could also be for you around how you eat? Yeah, it could be around learning, work hours, exercising, I get a lot of people like not drinking so much alcohol and having more water, which is important. It could also be kind of getting back into some of your hobbies. I know my soccer is starting up soon. Maybe you have a hobby of painting, or a hobby of playing the piano, rock climbing, you know, whatever it may be, you want to get back into the swing of things. So how do you do this?

Diane Rolston: 00:02:51

Well, I first want to ask you, how do you prefer to do it? What's your style, and then I'll give you some ideas in order to do them. So by styling mean do you want to go like all in and bring back all your routines at one time? Does that feel good for you? Now, you might already be thinking, I don't want to that, I don't want to do them all at the same time. Now the cost here is that by doing all of them at the same time, it can feel overwhelming. And so if you are like highly sensitive person or an anxious person, or someone who has trouble with change, then this might not be the best option for you. But the joy of this is that you're telling yourself I'm all in I'm doing this I'm committed. And the joy of being committed and going all in is that you can habit stack. And so one habit will trigger another positive habit. So for example, going to bed early is going to support you getting up early and going to the gym. But if you decide to get up early to go to the gym, but you don't decide to go to bed early, and you're staying up late, like the night version of you is screwing over the morning version of you. So just think of it think of it that way. So that's kind of the pros and cons and the costs and the joys of that style.

Diane Rolston: 00:04:11

The other style, as you can probably guessed by now is piece by piece. So you think what's the first habit that I need to bring in and this could be the first habit that's the easiest to bring in. It could be that habit that is the fastest to bring in. It could be the habit that you are looking forward to the most. And so it might be something like a walk in the morning. And so if walk in the morning is the first habit that you want to bring in. Then you get up and you go for your walk. Right and maybe you spend the first three days. The walk in the morning is the first thing and then after you have a little bit of time getting that walk in, you bring in the second task, or the second routine or habit piece that you want to add in and that could be I want to have my healthy green smoothie.

Diane Rolston: 00:05:01

So then you start bringing the smoothie, right? And so we're putting one habit on another once we have time to bring it in. Now, key thing for this is, if you want kind of like after the long weekend here in Canada or when school starts in September, if you want like that day to be the day that you start, you have to think if you're bringing in all of those habits or routine pieces that I mentioned. So sleeping, eating better exercising hobbies, work hours, all these things, then how long do you want that to take if you're doing one habit at a time. So the cost of this of this approach is that it's going to take you a long time to really get into things. Because if it's bigger habits, I would say you only do one habit until and you don't learn anything else until you're actually like doing it and it's feeling good, and you're sticking to it. And if you don't know what the five stages of change if you have my Dynamic You book, and that will help you to move kind of through it a little bit easier. If you're wondering how you get the book, you can go to Amazon, it's on there, or you can message me and we can talk about me sending you an autographed copy. That's not what this is about.

Diane Rolston: 00:06:16

Let me tell you the costs of this, it can take a long time. Plus you miss out on the opportunity of one habit supporting another habit. So some things might be harder to do, because you haven't done the other habit that really goes well with it. And then the joys of this is that if you are having trouble bringing on new things, so your willpower is terrible, you're not being able to be committed, then this is an easier approach. For some people, it's easier. For me I like I want to kind of jump in full force to most of the habits and then add a few layers of habits and routines after. And maybe that's the approach you take. So that could be like approach number three is around, you bring in a whole bunch of habits that support each other. And then after that you add in the other ones. So for example, right now, I'm currently going to bed earlier, so that I can wake up earlier. And first thing in the morning I'm reading and I'm eating healthy food. Okay, what I'm going to bring in later, is the full like my full morning routine. With visualizations and affirmations and prayer and exercise, reading I'm doing and reading and journaling, journaling, that's the one I have the hard part, the trouble with. And I usually exercise later in the day. But if you are trying to bring in if like I'm going to bring in a bunch of things, and then add on some pieces after. So later, I'm going to bring in probably drinking more water because I'm not drinking enough. Other things, I'm probably going to bring in some weight training, I'm doing Pilates and playing soccer, but I know I need to do some weight training, I want to do some weight training. And then the journaling piece as I mentioned.

Diane Rolston: 00:08:04

So with these two approaches, you know, ask yourself or three approaches, ask yourself which feels better, then once you've picked that, decide for yourself, when is my start date. So if you're doing everything at once, give yourself a day or two to just prepare, right? If you're like going to eat healthy, and go to bed early, like maybe you need to change your schedule, maybe you need to go shopping to get this ready. So choose a start date. That's step one. Step two is prepare. So you as I mentioned, you might have to prepare your schedule, you might have to prepare the things, the tasks that you need to put in place before this can happen. So if you need to, if you are wanting to join a gym, or you want to get exercising, again, maybe you have to go and join a gym, or you need to go get better running shoes, walking shoes, there's so many different pieces, right? You need to get the groceries to eat better, you need to maybe join a class, if you want to exercise, you maybe need to go to the library and pick up a book because you've read all of yours. So there's a few options here for how to prepare.

Diane Rolston: 00:09:11

So you've chosen to do it, you've picked your date you're preparing, then maybe you need some accountability. So accountability with a friend, accountability with an app on your phone accountability with your coach, whatever it may be, or someone just to kind of do it with. So if you want to be walking more, maybe you have a walking buddy or a gym buddy, or you have a meal sharing friend that, right, that you get involved with. So you've got a bunch of options there for getting into action. And that's actually the fourth stage of change.

Diane Rolston: 00:09:47

The fifth stage of change is when this is a lifestyle for you. And this brings me to kind of the preventative measures. Actually let me pause I don't want to do preventative measures. Give me one more moment to give the last step that you need to do. So you have picture day, you've prepared you get into action, you have some accountability. And then you need some kind of milestone, some check ins. So maybe after a few days you check in how is this going? Do I need to change anything, review where you've been, evaluate, say, is this going well for me, and then know that if it's not, you can just make changes, right? Maybe you need more accountability, maybe you need a better plan, maybe you need to add in another habit to support you. And that's okay.

Diane Rolston: 00:10:33

So let me tell you about preventative measures so that this doesn't happen to you. A lot of times we have things that we do in the morning that are part of our routine. But we go on vacation, we just don't have time, right? Maybe our routine in the morning was an hour and we don't have time, or we're running off to work and we just don't have time anymore. Can you during that period of busyness during that vacation, during that time, rather than completely scrapped the routine, could you do 10 minutes of each of those things that you normally do? 10 minutes of journaling, 10 minutes of reading, 10 minutes of running, 10 minutes of visualization, whatever it may be. And if you're like, that's too long, okay, can you do five minutes? How about four minutes? Could you instead of going for a 30-minute run? Could you do like a minute of jumping jacks, and then a minute of journaling, or one healthy meal a day? So preventative, if you don't want to get out of your routines, let me encourage you that the next time you go on vacation, or it's a busy season, that you still keep your habits in a minimal way. This doesn't mean that you have to eat perfectly on vacation, or you have to exercise every day on vacation, or during a stressful time, you have to make sure you're doing all of these things. However, if you do them just a little bit, this is that commitment that stays with yourself this is that I still love reading, I want to keep doing it. I want to walk all the time. So you get a little piece of it, your body is kind of committed and and is remembering that Oh, I like these things. I want to do these things so that when you actually have the time, you can just extend or do it more. That's so much easier than trying to get back into our routines. Now if you're coming back into September and want to get back into your routines and you're like Darn it, I didn't do the preventative. Not a problem. Not a problem.

Diane Rolston: 00:12:29

If you need to listen back through this, like give it a very quick recap, decide do you want to go all in and do all the routines at the same time? Or do you want to do like one routine at an at a time and add them in one by one. That's the first piece. The second piece then is to what pick a date when you're starting, then prepare, get some accountability and get into action, and then review how it's going.

Diane Rolston: 00:12:55

Okay, and if I can support you in any way to make this an easier transition, or to support you in answering another one of your questions, drop them below or reach out to me, you can DM me on whatever platform that we're on right now. So I trust that you have gotten your next action step to help you to get back into the swing of things back into your routines. And you probably have a friend that you know needs to hear this so share it with them, hit like and subscribe if you haven't yet and write us a review. And once you do, please send a screenshot of it to team@dianerolston.com so that we can send you a little something special in the mail. So don't forget to include your mailing address. Until next time, everyone. Stay dynamic!