August 21, 2024 • 34 mins
Discover the hidden power of rituals with Harvard professor Michael Norton. In this episode, Norton reveals how simple actions can transform your life, relationships, and work. Forget everything you thought you knew about habits – it's time to harness the profound impact of rituals.In this episode, you'll learn:
- 🔮 The crucial difference between habits and rituals
- 🛠️ How to create meaningful rituals in your personal and professional life
- ❤️ Why rituals are the secret ingredient to strong relationships
- 💼 The surprising link between rituals and job satisfaction
- 💡 How to use rituals to boost creativity and innovation at work
- 🧠 The science behind why mundane moments can become powerful sources of joy
Whether you're looking to improve your relationships, enhance your work life, or simply find more meaning in your daily routines, this conversation with Michael Norton will give you the tools to make lasting, positive changes.
Connect with Michael Norton via his LinkedIn and Website. Grab a copy of The Ritual Effect.
My new book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/
Connect with me on the socials:
Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)
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If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/
Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.
Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au
Credits:
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber
Episode Producer: Rowena Murray
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
In a world obsessed with habits and routines. What if
I like to hold you There's something even more powerful.
Meet Michael Norton, Harvard Business School professor and author of
The Ritual Effect. Michael's groundbreaking research has revealed how simple
rituals can transform our relationships, boost job satisfaction, and inject
(00:24):
meaning into our everyday lives. But what exactly is a
ritual and how is it different from a habit? How
can we harness the power of rituals to improve our
work and our personal lives? And why might clinking your
silverware be the secret to a happier relationship. Welcome to
(00:49):
How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies
for optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber.
When I was researching Michael before this in You, something
I heard him say is that good habits automate us
and rituals animate us. So I wanted to know how
exactly a habit's different from rituals.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
One thing I want to say. First off, I'm not
anti habit. I think good habits are great. You know,
I wish I had better habits, and I wish I
exercised and all this kind of stuff. But after a
while I kind of started thinking, imagine, starting today, you
had perfect habits for the rest of your life. Every
morning you did the steps and the eating right, and
like perfect.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Perfect, perfect.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
I was thinking that after let's say thirty years of that,
you'd be super healthy. But would you feel like you
had an interesting life, or a rich life, or a
full kind of life? And I think for me, at least,
the answer is no. You probably would have gotten divorced
because your spouse probably couldn't stand how rigid you were
with your habits, you know, And that really got me
thinking that there's more to it than just good habits.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Habits are wonderful.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
We can check them off our list and get them done,
and that's really good for us, but they leave out
a lot of the other range of human experience. And
one of the things that really relates to that huge
range of our emotional lives is rituals. We use rituals
all over the place for so many different things in
our lives, and I just really wanted to dive into it.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
When I read your book The Ritual Effect. It got
me thinking, obviously about the rituals that I have in
my life and thinking how did they even come about?
And I loved how in the book you shared quite
a few of your rituals. I remember there was one
where you talk about how you'll pace back and forth
in your office about thirty minutes before your lectures, and
I wanted to know how have you gone about creating
(02:36):
rituals in your life? Because they're obviously so friend of mine,
because they're so katy your research.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
What's so funny is I think sometimes they just happen
to us. So I think sometimes life throws things at us,
and one of the things that we use in response
is something like a ritual. So for me, for example,
when my wife and I had our daughter, we you know,
when you have a kid, you have a baby, and
then they say take that home with you and then
(03:02):
there you go.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
You know, that's like that's it. They're like, good luck
with that.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Nobody knows anything, and one of the things you're trying
to do is just figure out what to do. And
of course it's like sleep. Any new parent is like sleep,
are you sleeping? Is the baby sleeping house?
Speaker 3 (03:12):
A sleep?
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So we were nervous about that too, and we wanted
our daughter to sleep, and we just started doing stuff.
We were just trying to like experiment with how do
we help her get some rest? And then suddenly, after
like a couple of months, we realized we had some
insanely elaborate.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Process in place that was very specific.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
You know. It was like this book, then that song,
then the bath, then a bottle, then these two stuffed animals.
I mean, you know, it was like a very If
you mapped it out, it what looked like we were crazy.
And then of course all new parents are doing the
same thing. It's just slightly different books and different songs
and things like that. And so there it wasn't a
case where we said, oh my gosh, we're having a baby,
let's sit down and write out a ritual that we
(03:53):
can use for bedtime. It's just that the world got
uncertain and threw us off, and we spontaneous brought ritual
to bear in our own specific kind of way. For sure,
we have rituals that are religious or that are you know,
from tradition and things like that, and those are really
important in our lives. But the kind that I got
really interested in at the kind where people just come
(04:16):
up with almost out of thin air, and they can
be really random and really funny, and yet then people say, boy,
I really feel a lot better after I did that one.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
It's interesting because there's obviously so much power in rituals,
and I read the book and I thought, I want
to create more rituals in my life, like both in
my personal life and in my work life. Let's just
say I was standing from a blank slate, what advice
would you give me?
Speaker 2 (04:40):
I think the first thing is where do you need them? So, like,
for example, we did research on performance anxiety, and lots
of people do rituals when they're nervous, like celebrities do it,
but also regular people like us do it as well.
But some people don't have performance anxiety. So if you don't,
don't bother with trying out a ritual, do you know
what I mean? But sometimes we need them when we
(05:01):
need them, and we don't always need them in every situation.
But if there's places where you think, you know, it's
not exactly going exactly how I wanted it to go,
those are sometimes places where it's good to experiment.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
So something like a family ritual at dinner.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
In my family, what we do at the beginning of
every dinner is we do gratitude, where each person says
something that happened that they're grateful for. My daughter tends
to reuse the same one because she's not that interested
in doing. But hopefully, we're thinking over time it'll kind
of sink in. But why do we do gratitude is
because my wife and I think that's an incredibly important
thing to be in life, is to feel grateful. There's
(05:38):
a family that we came across that whenever something goes
well for them during the day, they write it on
a piece of paper and put it in a fish bowl.
You don't read them at all, and then once a
year they all take out all the things they put
in the fish bowl and just celebrate each other's success,
which is just that definitely not like a thousand year
old tradition. And yet you can see this family that
(05:59):
thought we should celebrate each other's wins, and we should
do it in a way that's idiosyncratic and a little
funny and a little different.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Do you think, like, if you're trying to create a ritual,
you need quite a dose of creativity, I mean, and
given the rituals that I've heard you talk about, they're
a lot of them are very quirky as opposed to straightforward.
If you're kind of starting with value, the ritual that
gets developed is often quite surprising.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I think.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
One of the things that's very, very common in couples,
for example, is something in the morning involving coffee or tea.
One person makes it for the other person. They both
make sure they have it every morning together before work.
You know, there's a lot of things in the morning,
specifically around coffee and tea. Coffee and tea that is
not creative, you know what I mean. Lots of people
(06:44):
drink coffee and tea. It's not the coffee. You don't
need some crazy liquid in order to have something really
special with your spouse. It's not just caffeine in a cup.
But it's something that I'm making from my spouse and
delivering it to them every morning or every sun day
or whatever it might be, for years and years and years,
and then it can start to have all this meaning.
(07:04):
Even if it's just liquid in a cup. It's not
liquid in a cup. It becomes something more than that.
It's actually bizarre and wonderful that we're able to do
this as humans.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Let's stay on the topic of relationships because there's quite
a significant section about that in the Ritual Effect, and
I was thinking about that. My partner Neo and I
we've got various rituals, and it's funny one that we've
had since very early on in our relationship. For it,
from a few years back, is that we started doing
this monthly check in where every month or so, over
(07:36):
sort of four to six weeks, we would sit down.
It would sometimes just be on the couch at home,
sometimes it would be out at a date night at
a restaurant, and we would have a set list of
questions that we would go through, maybe eight or nine
questions about what are we appreciating about the other person,
what's frustrating us connection activities, do we want to plan
(07:56):
for the coming month, and a whole lot of them.
We went through that a few weeks ago we were
on holiday in Vietnam, and it kind of occurred to
us both, this ritual is no longer serving us. It
feels like these are not the right questions, and I'd
love to get your insight on that, Like when do
you know that it's time to refresh a ritual or
drop a ritual?
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yeah, I love this question. I also love that the
ritual that you did. You said sometimes it was on
date night, but it didn't need to be. I think
when we talk about relationship rituals and we said, you know,
someone says, well, how do I start one? What should
I do? The default often is date night. What we
should do is every Friday we should get a babysitter
or whatever we need to do and go out for dinner,
(08:39):
and then that will be good.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
But it isn't necessarily right.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
I mean, if neither of us like going out to dinner,
why would we make a date night into our ritual? Right,
So for you, it could have been on a date night,
but that wasn't the ritual, right. The ritual was this
thing that you did together where you express curiosity about
each other and make sure you're on the same page.
To have a ritual, it is really what you're bringing
to it. But you're completely right that rituals we outgrow them,
(09:05):
just like often sometimes very quickly. And again it's because
we often bring them to bear when we're faced with
something where we need a little help. So, for example,
our daughter is eight now, and if we tried to
do the bedtime ritual that we used to do, she'd be.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Like, this is stupid. You know, I don't need all
these silly books or whatever.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Of course, right because she's fine sleeping now, I don't
need to do this anymore. And so often, like the
world will move on sometimes and then we say, oh, actually,
I don't need to keep doing that. With grief, for example,
you know, people often will do something to honor the
person they lost every day, every week, every month, but
they don't necessarily do it for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
They do it.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
While they're still really acutely experiencing grief, and then years later,
it's not that they're never totally over a grief, but
they don't need to do that specific ritual anymore because
they're in a different place with their grief and.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Have it Like I'm just thinking about Fino and I
should we go about creating a new ritual because we're
at a different stage of our relationship and the old
ritual we just weren't feeling like it was providing any
value anymore.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
What was the check in?
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Yeah, I think because we are both quite self optimizer people,
we're like, how can we firstly make sure we communicate
really well? Which I think comes naturally to both of us,
and we've both been divorced and this is our second
significant relationship in life, so we've learned a lot from that.
And we obviously no communications critical in relationships, and so
(10:35):
we wanted a time where we could exactly, like you said,
get curious, but also potentially tackle some of the more
challenging things that you don't want to talk about in
a relationship. And I guess be really mindful in how
we were showing up for each other. So it wasn't
necessarily about getting to know each other, although there was
(10:55):
a component of that. I think it was checking in
and being present and not taking for granted and having
this communication forum.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Yeah, I think it's great. I mean, the communication is good.
Some couples it comes naturally, and other couples are like,
you know, we need to put something in place to
make sure that we're community. A couple's therapy is another
version of that, right where we're going to once a week,
we're going to make sure we have to communicate for
fifty minutes no matter what. That's our commitment to each other.
But just like with your ritual or with couples therapy,
(11:24):
sometimes you've learned how to do the thing without needing
to have some specific time at which you do the thing.
So I would imagine that in a way, the themes
of those conversations still come up between the two of you,
but not in a we need to talk about this
like at this time, or we won't, but just in
a these are things that we talk about now. They
(11:44):
kind of help us become familiar or comfortable with something,
and then we're still doing them a little bit, but
we don't need the rigid it has to be Tuesday
at three o'clock or we'll never get it done.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
We recently went to Vietnam and I was reflecting how how,
just by I don't even know how, we created this
really great morning ritual where we'd wake up, we'd go
watch the sunrise, we'd go for a swim, we'd go
to the gym, we'd have breakfast, and it seems quite simple,
but it just brought such joy to the mornings. And
I don't think I even realized that that was a
(12:16):
ritual at the time, but looking back, I'm like, that
was one of the best things about the holiday. I'm
morning Richel. Can you shed light on how these things
develop and how we can be more mindful in creating
more meaning through these rituals in our life.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
And you don't do sunrise swim at home. It's kind
of when you went to a new environment you started this.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Yes, as we're recording this in Melbourne, it's early, it's dark.
I'm thinking my day is not starting with sunrise, Mike,
and it's certainly not starting with a swim because I
think it's ten degrees celsius outside.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Yeah, that is something that's so funny though, that sometimes
a new context prompts us to think differently about it, right,
that we don't have to do the same thing we've
always done because in a new context, because we get
pretty stuck and you know, the morning, I gotta get
the coffee or what you know what I mean, we
get in these routines, I guess is what I would say.
And it does take effort to take a beat and say,
(13:10):
wait a minute, maybe we could do something even though
we're not on holiday and it's not you know, amazingly new,
are there things we could bring back from that that
might still be really valuable. So I do think lying
around us sometimes are the things that we can use already,
but we just get stuck and got to get to
work something like that, and it's hard to step out
(13:30):
of it until the world shoots us out of it,
and then we'll often quite creative once we're needing it.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
It's given me some good food for thought. Mike. I'm
going to go back to NEO and tell them about
this little segment of our interview and say, how can
we bring some of that morning back to our Melbourne mornings.
I like that now. One of other things that that
you write and talk about is the role that richels
play in our self identity. I really was interested in
how we can use richels when our self identity shifts,
(13:59):
and in the ritual effect. You spoke about how when
you received tenure, like that's obviously quite a significant shift
in your work identity who you are job security, but
day to day your work didn't actually change that much.
And I was curious around what rituals did you use
(14:19):
to shift yourself identity, whether they be conscious or unconscious
things that emerged.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
You know. It's it's so funny with rights of passage,
the skeptics would be like, I don't do any rituals.
You know, those are for like people who like crystals
or whatever. You know, the cricuals are not for me.
And one of the example that I always say is like,
have you ever put on a robe and a weird
hat and walked up on a stage and walked across
the stage and taken a piece of paper from somebody
(14:44):
that's rolled up in a thing and then gotten off
the stage? And then everybody else did in the course?
Pople say oh, yeah, of course they've done that, And
I say, why why did you do that? What was
the point of the robe and everything? Because your coursework
was done these graduations like, of course we do that.
It's not like you don't graduate until put the robond typically,
So why do.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
We do things like that?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
And I mean every culture does things like this, especially
between childhood and adulthood, where they market somehow with you
were that and now you're this, And the question is
why do we do it?
Speaker 3 (15:16):
So we don't do that to four year olds.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
We're aware that they're too little to be adults, so
we don't say you put the robond on your four
and now you're supposed to be an adult. We do
it when the moment is around, when we're ready, and
that's when we say, okay, now you're going to go
from being a kid to an adult. And I think
the same with our careers as well. You know, when
we get promotions, you don't typically get promoted to tenure
(15:38):
of the day you start, because you just started.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
You're not ready really for the other responsibilities.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
So back when you were saved tenure, do you remember
doing anything or changing anything differently to help support that
change in self identity.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
I think tenure is funny because there's not a ceremony
like retirement. We typically don't have an official thing. You
might have like a cake or something like that, but
we don't have like ceremonies for promotions in the way
that we do for retirements, which is just interesting. I
did have an experience that I for some reason it's
so vivid to me, where I was in a meeting
(16:14):
with maybe like fifteen other people around a table and
the meeting wasn't starting, and I was kind of like,
what why is this meeting get started now? Like what
are we waiting for? Looking at the clock and stuff
like that, And then I realized that I was the
oldest person and had tenure, and so everybody was waiting
for me to do it because it was the oldest
person here. I think they should start the meeting. But
(16:34):
you see these things where you also get conferred upon
you now other people will see you differently as well.
It isn't just that I see myself differently. It's that
now the world says, oh, he's.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
A different person.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Now we have different expectations for him. He's supposed to
do different things. That can be like a nightmare, like
how I God, I'm trapped, or it's a reflection of where.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
You are in your life, and it means truly, hopefully.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
I am a little bit different, you know, than I
was when I was twenty five, now that I have tenure.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Yeah, that's interesting. I'm also thinking about my own life
where I recently shifted into a slightly different role in
my business. I was in this acting CEO role and
now I've put someone else in that role and I've
moved back to more of a creative kind of role.
And I remember when that happened, I completely rearranged my desk,
(17:24):
my work set up, and shifted monitors around, and I
thought like, that will be really good to DeMar kate
the old me with the new me, because also I
need to behave differently in order to let the new
CEO do her job really well, I'm wondering, now should
I be creating some new rituals as well, because I'm
sure that there's many people listening that maybe have just
(17:46):
changed jobs or thinking about changing jobs, or what should
I be thinking about now in terms of continuing like
using rituals to shift my self identity.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
It's funny my research group here, which we creatively called
nerd Lab because.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
We're Nerds of the West.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yeah, we have a thing that's called Random Ideas Day,
and Random Ideas Day is everybody has to bring in
an idea about humans, about how humans work, like as
broadly defined as you possibly could, and share it with
the group and we brainstorm about it. But the rule
is you cannot work on that idea. It's random ideas
And it's like it seems maybe like a waste of time,
(18:23):
you know, bring ideas and then you to throw them away.
But what we're trying to do is say the most
important thing is being creative, but coming up with ideas
is the currency. It's not writing stuff or doing statistics
that s it's all important or whatever.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
That's not what it is though.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
It's actually the creativity that's really valued, that we really
care about and celebrate. The job is come up with
as many ideas as you can. They don't be good,
they don't have to be bad. So we're using that
ritual to really try to communicate we're supposed to be
a creative, supportive community. And I think for you as well,
you can think about what are the rituals you put
in place. If the value that you have is creativity,
(19:00):
what are you going to put in place every day
or every week by yourself or with other people that
shows like, no, no, this is creative time. It's not
the email time, it's not the meetings time. This is
the creative time. And even just carving space like that
out is incredibly valuable because I mean every organization is
like we're a learning organization or we're innovative or whatever,
(19:22):
and then you look at what people do every day
and so it's not reflected in any of the tasks
that people do. There's nothing that your employees do that
have anything to do with the values you're saying. So
of course it's not going to happen until you start
putting things in place where you say, you know what,
every Friday at two o'clock is innovation time, whatever that means.
I'm just riffing, but you know you really have to
say no, no, We're going to put these structures into
(19:44):
place so we give people time and space to do
the thing that we're all hoping that they do.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
I like that approach. We will be back with Michael
soon where he talks me through how we can develop
powerful rituals at work that drive connection to our team
and also motivation for what we do. If you're looking
for more tips to improve the way you work can live.
I write a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've
(20:12):
discovered that have helped me personally. You can sign up
for that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com.
I do want to delve into rituals at work because
I was really intrigued around some of the things that
you're writing there, and you gave a lot of interesting
(20:34):
examples around different rituals that were in different workplaces, and
when I was reading them, I kind of noticed that
a lot of them felt like they were dependent on
being face to face. Now that we're in this hybrid
world and certainly my organization is remote. First, we gave
up all our office leases. I'd love to know what
are some of the most interesting rituals that you've seen
(20:57):
that can happen in a remote environment.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
You know what's so funny is I signed this contract
to write this book in January of twenty twenty and
thinking of the world as it was in January of
twenty twenty and the world in twenty twenty four is
just with work.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
It's just like it's a completely different world.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
It's there's so much less face to face, there's so
much everything, and so you could imagine that when everything
goes online, what people do is say, we don't need
any rituals, like those are a waste of time anyway,
let's skip them.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Now that we're online.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Even with something like weddings, you know, you could be like,
you know what, weddings were a pain, Let's not do
weddings now that we're online. It's not what people do, like,
how do we make a wedding online? Right? We bring
it to the medium and try to make it work.
And we saw that at work too. There's a team
I talked to you that I love that they started
doing when they went remote. They started doing at the
beginning of every zoom meeting, everyone would click the emoji
(21:49):
that reflected how they were feeling. You could also see,
is anybody not doing well? You know, maybe I should
follow up with them, But in a very low stakes way.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
It wasn't like a ason.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
As you clicked sad emoji, everyone was like, boom, you know,
let's focus on him right now and make sure right
that's the worst and that What was so cool about
this team was they hadn't done anything like that before
they went online.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
It wasn't like they.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Had a ritual in person where they would check in
with each other.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
They didn't at all.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
They just started meetings and so they used the different
medium to create a ritual that actually was fantastic for
them that never would have occurred to them before.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
What did you do with the nerd Lab during the
COVID times when presumably you were all remote?
Speaker 2 (22:31):
We went remote and we tried to do random ideas
as well. One of the things that we love to
do is the quick conversations that happened at the beginning
of meetings where just randomly you and I happen to
show up first and we chat for two minutes and
the number to go to get there. Of course, with zoom.
That doesn't happen. You're all in the screen at once.
You can't have one conversation because it's somebody's watching. So
(22:52):
we started doing things like before the meeting started, if
you got there, you just got like zipped into a
room with somebody else, to try to simulate those random,
little quick conversations before the meeting. It was just supposed
to be the like, hey, how's it going. We're here first,
So we did a little bit of that, And what
we're trying to do there is again spur the quick
conversation between people that you might not otherwise chat with
(23:15):
and just see what comes of it, you know, see
if anything ideas come out of it or collaborations come
out of it that might not have otherwise. So we're
trying the best we could to sort of engineer the
same spirit. What we're trying to do was use the
medium as best we could to still have some of
the things that we loved.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Were there any other ritels you found? What's well is.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
Ritels for the grave when you're remote, for sure.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
I think one of the most important things is like
if I go to a company and chat with people
there and I say rituals or something like that. Most
employees roll their eyes and they're like, oh my god,
because they think I mean like corporate retreats or even worse,
like the nightmare manager of the world is the one
who comes in on Monday and is like, I heard
a podcast or I saw a Ted talk and now
(23:59):
we're going to do everything like this from now you know,
Oh my god, you know, here they go again. And
so what we have seen that when rituals are mandated
from on high, they really can lead to reactance. Employees
are like, I'm not going to do that stupid.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
I mean, I'll do it because you're my boss, but
it's not going to resonate with me emotionally. The ones
that people really value are actually the ones that come
from the bottom up, from employees themselves, from the teams themselves.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
It's not going to work.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Can do them with kids either, you know, it just
doesn't work in the world to do that. So it
is this kind that bubble up from the creativity of teams,
often based on again, the values that they really care about.
There was a team that we say, is there anything
you do that's unique to your team that special? You
make sure to do it every so often, lots of
teams say yes. This one team described as a very
(24:49):
elaborate thing they did with lunch, which was five days
in the week. I think five people on the team,
so one person was responsible for lunch every day, so
they'd bring it in. You know, I was Monday, you
were two, and we did that every single week. And
in any case, it's just lunch. We're just going to
eat lunch. It's not a big deal. But what the
team is doing is they're saying, like, one day a week,
I take care of everyone on the team, and every
(25:11):
other day of the week someone on the team takes
care of me with food. It could be anything, but
it's with food. What are they doing there. They're taking
lunch and turning it into something that means they care
about each other and they're supportive of each other. And
the reason I think of that example is because if
management said here's a chart and everyone has to get
lunch for it, you know what, I mean your Friday
(25:32):
and you too, you know, I mean to be a
night like, oh my god, what if you do this?
So you can see the real difference between coming from
employees versus coming from on high.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
What are those key ingredients for a good ritual at work.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
The idea is to give people the space to be
creative and do things that mean something to them rather
than tell them exactly what to do. So you can think,
how do you start meetings, how do you end meetings?
What do you do for meals? What do you do
after work together? Do you have any little inside jokes
that you have on your team that other teams don't have.
Do you have a little shared language that you use.
(26:07):
We can just get them starting to think about their
culture in their team, even a three person team. We
can get them thinking about how are we the same
and how are we different from other teams? And most
teams will say, well, you know what, actually we do
this thing a little bit differently than other teams do it,
whatever it might be. Those are the great places to
start with building a ritual because you're already saying there's
something about our team that's unique, and we're just going
(26:29):
to kind of build it out a little bit and
value it a little bit more.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
It probably leads me on to asking about routines versus rituals,
which you talk more about in the context of relationships.
But I also wonder if it might be relevant for
work as well, where some things are just well, this
is just a routine instead of a ritual. Can you
explain the difference and why it matters.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
We had the saddest finding that we ever had was
with relationship rituals, where we get both members of a
couple and we ask them questions separately so they can't
hear what their partner told us. And we asked them,
you know, do you have anything just like we do
with teams actually it work. Do you have anything that's
special to the two of you that's unique that you
make sure to do every so often, every day, every week,
(27:12):
every month. Most couples say both. They both say yes, yes,
we do have something like that, and they tell us
what it. We clink the silverware or whatever.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
It might be.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
A small percent of couples they both say no, like
we just don't have anything like that. But there's this
percent of couples that are the saddest, which are we
ask one person do you have anything like this, and
they're like, oh, my god, we totally do. What we
do is the sunrise in the morning and then we
take a swim and it's you know what I mean.
They're really describing this, and then we have the other
person they're like, no, we don't do anything like that,
(27:41):
and that mismatch is so painful, but it shows you
that the same exact activity can either be a really
meaningful ritual or a routine. It isn't actually the actions themselves.
Sunrise happens no matter what. Doesn't matter if it's a
ritual or not for you. But some people turn it
into something more and other people kind of just see
(28:03):
it as a routine, and I think, again, that's what
you're bringing to it. A couple that one person said,
every weekend we go food shopping, and you know, we
pick the meals for the week, and we think about
who we're going to have over for dinner and what
they would like to have to eat. So we're really
kind of building our week together with shopping. And the
other person was like, I guess we go shopping nothing
(28:26):
in it, you know what I mean. So you see
these mismatches between couples, and I think for us, it's
like try to get on the same page if you
possibly can. And I don't know the story specificly behind
that couple, but you can imagine one person's a foodie,
so food is like really meaningful to them, and the
other person doesn't care about food, So that's not a
good place to try the ritual, right, It has to
(28:48):
be things that we both value that reflects something about
both of us. Those can be the better places to go.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
And is that often what's happening there Where someone says
it as a ritual and someone says it as a
retain there's just a mismatch in what matters to that
person or their values, or is it potentially a sign
of deeper relationship dissatisfaction.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
If we ask people, do you have a ritual like this?
And then we ask people questions about how satisfied are
you with your relationship? How committed do you feel, and
how committed do you think your partner is. The presence
of a ritual or not is a pretty good predictor
of all of those things. Meaning, if you have one,
those things are higher, and if you don't have one,
(29:30):
those things are lower. There's a lot of information contained
within the fact that we have this special thing that
we do that only we do, and we do it
every day or every week or every month. They really
are a sign of something much deeper. In fact, the
funniest maybe the funniest thing we ever found was we
asked people about their relationship rituals, and then we said,
(29:51):
how would you feel if you broke up and your
partner reused it? And you've I mean, people are horre
I mean the anger. And and it's because if you say,
how would you feel if they start dating someone new?
How would you feel if they marry someone new? You
don't like that, but they're allowed. But if you say,
if they reused your four clinking thing like murder, I
(30:12):
mean you're dead to me. And again that shows it's
just a tiny little thing, but so much is bound
in them. They're so emotional and so important to us.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
So in terms of the satisfaction or the improvement in
relationship satisfaction that rituals bring, do you find that that
result translates to the workplace as well in terms of
having rituals as an organization or with our team.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
We do see with teams where we ask them, it's
so funny. It's the same questions, do you have something
special and unique and you do it?
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Every so often?
Speaker 2 (30:42):
The teams that tell us they do have higher job satisfaction.
But one of the things that we really see is
that they see more meaning in their work, and it
partly happens because they see the ritual as meaningful. In
other words, lunch isn't just lunch, it's meaningful. It means
something to me. These the people on my team are
meaningful to me. The work that we do is meaningful
(31:02):
to me. And that's pretty consistent that we see across
these things. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that if you
start a ritual tomorrow, you're now going to see your
work as incredibly meaningful instantly, right, That's not how they work,
but again very strong signal, just like with romantic relationships,
that the presence of one of these means all sorts
of things about how you feel about your work, where
(31:24):
if you don't have one of them, those things can
be much much lower.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
One of my favorite studies, probably my favorite one in
the Ritual Effect, which i'd love to finish on, is
where you described how the task was for participants to
write about February seven and February fourteen and what happened
on both days. Can you talk a bit about that
research and what came out of that and importantly, what
(31:50):
are the implications for us in terms of using rituals
to be great as just savoring moments in life.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
My colleague at HBS ting Xiong, came into my office
one day and she said, why do people make time capsules?
Speaker 3 (32:04):
And I was like, I have no idea.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
I mean, we take things, we put them in a
thing and bury it and then sometimes later we dig
it up, but more often somebody else is supposed.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
To dig it up later.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
What do we literally, what are we doing? Why are
we burying things in the ground. I mean, it's a
crazy It's like when dogs do that, We're like, well
that's weird, but we do it all the time. And
so she was so interested in that phenomenon, and she
got onto this idea of rediscovery as being something that's
really powerful for us and the study that The funniest one,
as you said, that she came up with was she
(32:36):
asked people to write about their day. And it's on
different days. So some people, she says, February seventh, write
about your day, and other people, she says, write about
your day on February fourteenth, which is Valentine's Day. And
she asks people, I'm going to take those descriptions from you,
and in a couple of months. Which one do you
think you'd be interested in reading? The Valentine's Day one
(32:57):
or the one.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
From February seventh.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Most people say, oh, the Valentine's Day one, because it's
a special day and all this kind of stuff. But
then when time passes and you ask them again, they say, well,
I kind of remember Valentine's Day. I have no idea
what happened on February seventh, And that's the one that
they really want to read. And when they read it,
they say, oh my god, I completely forgot about that
weird guy that did the weird thing at work, you know.
I mean, these things come back to us that are
(33:20):
very mundane, and that's what's so important actually, is it's
rediscovering mundane things, and that feeling of rediscovery is a
completely free source of joy that we completely don't take
advantage of. We tend to focus on the big things
like the wedding instead of the fork clinking. I think
it really is this general thing where the big things
are important and big, but these little, everyday, daily things
(33:43):
sometimes can add up to something really special as well.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Mike, thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge
about rituals. Find it absolutely fascinating. It's got me thinking
really differently about the things that I do consciously and
often unconsciously in my life and life relationships and at work.
And I just wanted to say thank you for sharing
your knowledge with me today.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Thank you so much for self funder chat.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
I hope that this chat with Michael prompted some thinking
for you about the rituals that you have at your
work and also in your life. And if you're keen
to learn more about Richel's I highly recommend grabbing a
copy of Michael's latest book, The Ritual Effect. If you
like today's show, make sure you hit follow on your
podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How
(34:32):
I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the
Warrangery people part of the Cool and Nation are big
thank you to my editor Rowena Murray and Martin Nimmer
for doing the sound mix.
In a world obsessed with habits and routines. What if
I like to hold you There's something even more powerful.
Meet Michael Norton, Harvard Business School professor and author of
The Ritual Effect. Michael's groundbreaking research has revealed how simple
rituals can transform our relationships, boost job satisfaction, and inject
(00:24):
meaning into our everyday lives. But what exactly is a
ritual and how is it different from a habit? How
can we harness the power of rituals to improve our
work and our personal lives? And why might clinking your
silverware be the secret to a happier relationship. Welcome to
(00:49):
How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies
for optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber.
When I was researching Michael before this in You, something
I heard him say is that good habits automate us
and rituals animate us. So I wanted to know how
exactly a habit's different from rituals.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
One thing I want to say. First off, I'm not
anti habit. I think good habits are great. You know,
I wish I had better habits, and I wish I
exercised and all this kind of stuff. But after a
while I kind of started thinking, imagine, starting today, you
had perfect habits for the rest of your life. Every
morning you did the steps and the eating right, and
like perfect.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Perfect, perfect.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
I was thinking that after let's say thirty years of that,
you'd be super healthy. But would you feel like you
had an interesting life, or a rich life, or a
full kind of life? And I think for me, at least,
the answer is no. You probably would have gotten divorced
because your spouse probably couldn't stand how rigid you were
with your habits, you know, And that really got me
thinking that there's more to it than just good habits.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Habits are wonderful.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
We can check them off our list and get them done,
and that's really good for us, but they leave out
a lot of the other range of human experience. And
one of the things that really relates to that huge
range of our emotional lives is rituals. We use rituals
all over the place for so many different things in
our lives, and I just really wanted to dive into it.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
When I read your book The Ritual Effect. It got
me thinking, obviously about the rituals that I have in
my life and thinking how did they even come about?
And I loved how in the book you shared quite
a few of your rituals. I remember there was one
where you talk about how you'll pace back and forth
in your office about thirty minutes before your lectures, and
I wanted to know how have you gone about creating
(02:36):
rituals in your life? Because they're obviously so friend of mine,
because they're so katy your research.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
What's so funny is I think sometimes they just happen
to us. So I think sometimes life throws things at us,
and one of the things that we use in response
is something like a ritual. So for me, for example,
when my wife and I had our daughter, we you know,
when you have a kid, you have a baby, and
then they say take that home with you and then
(03:02):
there you go.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
You know, that's like that's it. They're like, good luck
with that.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Nobody knows anything, and one of the things you're trying
to do is just figure out what to do. And
of course it's like sleep. Any new parent is like sleep,
are you sleeping? Is the baby sleeping house?
Speaker 3 (03:12):
A sleep?
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So we were nervous about that too, and we wanted
our daughter to sleep, and we just started doing stuff.
We were just trying to like experiment with how do
we help her get some rest? And then suddenly, after
like a couple of months, we realized we had some
insanely elaborate.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Process in place that was very specific.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
You know. It was like this book, then that song,
then the bath, then a bottle, then these two stuffed animals.
I mean, you know, it was like a very If
you mapped it out, it what looked like we were crazy.
And then of course all new parents are doing the
same thing. It's just slightly different books and different songs
and things like that. And so there it wasn't a
case where we said, oh my gosh, we're having a baby,
let's sit down and write out a ritual that we
(03:53):
can use for bedtime. It's just that the world got
uncertain and threw us off, and we spontaneous brought ritual
to bear in our own specific kind of way. For sure,
we have rituals that are religious or that are you know,
from tradition and things like that, and those are really
important in our lives. But the kind that I got
really interested in at the kind where people just come
(04:16):
up with almost out of thin air, and they can
be really random and really funny, and yet then people say, boy,
I really feel a lot better after I did that one.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
It's interesting because there's obviously so much power in rituals,
and I read the book and I thought, I want
to create more rituals in my life, like both in
my personal life and in my work life. Let's just
say I was standing from a blank slate, what advice
would you give me?
Speaker 2 (04:40):
I think the first thing is where do you need them? So, like,
for example, we did research on performance anxiety, and lots
of people do rituals when they're nervous, like celebrities do it,
but also regular people like us do it as well.
But some people don't have performance anxiety. So if you don't,
don't bother with trying out a ritual, do you know
what I mean? But sometimes we need them when we
(05:01):
need them, and we don't always need them in every situation.
But if there's places where you think, you know, it's
not exactly going exactly how I wanted it to go,
those are sometimes places where it's good to experiment.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
So something like a family ritual at dinner.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
In my family, what we do at the beginning of
every dinner is we do gratitude, where each person says
something that happened that they're grateful for. My daughter tends
to reuse the same one because she's not that interested
in doing. But hopefully, we're thinking over time it'll kind
of sink in. But why do we do gratitude is
because my wife and I think that's an incredibly important
thing to be in life, is to feel grateful. There's
(05:38):
a family that we came across that whenever something goes
well for them during the day, they write it on
a piece of paper and put it in a fish bowl.
You don't read them at all, and then once a
year they all take out all the things they put
in the fish bowl and just celebrate each other's success,
which is just that definitely not like a thousand year
old tradition. And yet you can see this family that
(05:59):
thought we should celebrate each other's wins, and we should
do it in a way that's idiosyncratic and a little
funny and a little different.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Do you think, like, if you're trying to create a ritual,
you need quite a dose of creativity, I mean, and
given the rituals that I've heard you talk about, they're
a lot of them are very quirky as opposed to straightforward.
If you're kind of starting with value, the ritual that
gets developed is often quite surprising.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I think.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
One of the things that's very, very common in couples,
for example, is something in the morning involving coffee or tea.
One person makes it for the other person. They both
make sure they have it every morning together before work.
You know, there's a lot of things in the morning,
specifically around coffee and tea. Coffee and tea that is
not creative, you know what I mean. Lots of people
(06:44):
drink coffee and tea. It's not the coffee. You don't
need some crazy liquid in order to have something really
special with your spouse. It's not just caffeine in a cup.
But it's something that I'm making from my spouse and
delivering it to them every morning or every sun day
or whatever it might be, for years and years and years,
and then it can start to have all this meaning.
(07:04):
Even if it's just liquid in a cup. It's not
liquid in a cup. It becomes something more than that.
It's actually bizarre and wonderful that we're able to do
this as humans.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Let's stay on the topic of relationships because there's quite
a significant section about that in the Ritual Effect, and
I was thinking about that. My partner Neo and I
we've got various rituals, and it's funny one that we've
had since very early on in our relationship. For it,
from a few years back, is that we started doing
this monthly check in where every month or so, over
(07:36):
sort of four to six weeks, we would sit down.
It would sometimes just be on the couch at home,
sometimes it would be out at a date night at
a restaurant, and we would have a set list of
questions that we would go through, maybe eight or nine
questions about what are we appreciating about the other person,
what's frustrating us connection activities, do we want to plan
(07:56):
for the coming month, and a whole lot of them.
We went through that a few weeks ago we were
on holiday in Vietnam, and it kind of occurred to
us both, this ritual is no longer serving us. It
feels like these are not the right questions, and I'd
love to get your insight on that, Like when do
you know that it's time to refresh a ritual or
drop a ritual?
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yeah, I love this question. I also love that the
ritual that you did. You said sometimes it was on
date night, but it didn't need to be. I think
when we talk about relationship rituals and we said, you know,
someone says, well, how do I start one? What should
I do? The default often is date night. What we
should do is every Friday we should get a babysitter
or whatever we need to do and go out for dinner,
(08:39):
and then that will be good.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
But it isn't necessarily right.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
I mean, if neither of us like going out to dinner,
why would we make a date night into our ritual? Right,
So for you, it could have been on a date night,
but that wasn't the ritual, right. The ritual was this
thing that you did together where you express curiosity about
each other and make sure you're on the same page.
To have a ritual, it is really what you're bringing
to it. But you're completely right that rituals we outgrow them,
(09:05):
just like often sometimes very quickly. And again it's because
we often bring them to bear when we're faced with
something where we need a little help. So, for example,
our daughter is eight now, and if we tried to
do the bedtime ritual that we used to do, she'd be.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Like, this is stupid. You know, I don't need all
these silly books or whatever.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Of course, right because she's fine sleeping now, I don't
need to do this anymore. And so often, like the
world will move on sometimes and then we say, oh, actually,
I don't need to keep doing that. With grief, for example,
you know, people often will do something to honor the
person they lost every day, every week, every month, but
they don't necessarily do it for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
They do it.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
While they're still really acutely experiencing grief, and then years later,
it's not that they're never totally over a grief, but
they don't need to do that specific ritual anymore because
they're in a different place with their grief and.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Have it Like I'm just thinking about Fino and I
should we go about creating a new ritual because we're
at a different stage of our relationship and the old
ritual we just weren't feeling like it was providing any
value anymore.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
What was the check in?
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Yeah, I think because we are both quite self optimizer people,
we're like, how can we firstly make sure we communicate
really well? Which I think comes naturally to both of us,
and we've both been divorced and this is our second
significant relationship in life, so we've learned a lot from that.
And we obviously no communications critical in relationships, and so
(10:35):
we wanted a time where we could exactly, like you said,
get curious, but also potentially tackle some of the more
challenging things that you don't want to talk about in
a relationship. And I guess be really mindful in how
we were showing up for each other. So it wasn't
necessarily about getting to know each other, although there was
(10:55):
a component of that. I think it was checking in
and being present and not taking for granted and having
this communication forum.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Yeah, I think it's great. I mean, the communication is good.
Some couples it comes naturally, and other couples are like,
you know, we need to put something in place to
make sure that we're community. A couple's therapy is another
version of that, right where we're going to once a week,
we're going to make sure we have to communicate for
fifty minutes no matter what. That's our commitment to each other.
But just like with your ritual or with couples therapy,
(11:24):
sometimes you've learned how to do the thing without needing
to have some specific time at which you do the thing.
So I would imagine that in a way, the themes
of those conversations still come up between the two of you,
but not in a we need to talk about this
like at this time, or we won't, but just in
a these are things that we talk about now. They
(11:44):
kind of help us become familiar or comfortable with something,
and then we're still doing them a little bit, but
we don't need the rigid it has to be Tuesday
at three o'clock or we'll never get it done.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
We recently went to Vietnam and I was reflecting how how,
just by I don't even know how, we created this
really great morning ritual where we'd wake up, we'd go
watch the sunrise, we'd go for a swim, we'd go
to the gym, we'd have breakfast, and it seems quite simple,
but it just brought such joy to the mornings. And
I don't think I even realized that that was a
(12:16):
ritual at the time, but looking back, I'm like, that
was one of the best things about the holiday. I'm
morning Richel. Can you shed light on how these things
develop and how we can be more mindful in creating
more meaning through these rituals in our life.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
And you don't do sunrise swim at home. It's kind
of when you went to a new environment you started this.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Yes, as we're recording this in Melbourne, it's early, it's dark.
I'm thinking my day is not starting with sunrise, Mike,
and it's certainly not starting with a swim because I
think it's ten degrees celsius outside.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Yeah, that is something that's so funny though, that sometimes
a new context prompts us to think differently about it, right,
that we don't have to do the same thing we've
always done because in a new context, because we get
pretty stuck and you know, the morning, I gotta get
the coffee or what you know what I mean, we
get in these routines, I guess is what I would say.
And it does take effort to take a beat and say,
(13:10):
wait a minute, maybe we could do something even though
we're not on holiday and it's not you know, amazingly new,
are there things we could bring back from that that
might still be really valuable. So I do think lying
around us sometimes are the things that we can use already,
but we just get stuck and got to get to
work something like that, and it's hard to step out
(13:30):
of it until the world shoots us out of it,
and then we'll often quite creative once we're needing it.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
It's given me some good food for thought. Mike. I'm
going to go back to NEO and tell them about
this little segment of our interview and say, how can
we bring some of that morning back to our Melbourne mornings.
I like that now. One of other things that that
you write and talk about is the role that richels
play in our self identity. I really was interested in
how we can use richels when our self identity shifts,
(13:59):
and in the ritual effect. You spoke about how when
you received tenure, like that's obviously quite a significant shift
in your work identity who you are job security, but
day to day your work didn't actually change that much.
And I was curious around what rituals did you use
(14:19):
to shift yourself identity, whether they be conscious or unconscious
things that emerged.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
You know. It's it's so funny with rights of passage,
the skeptics would be like, I don't do any rituals.
You know, those are for like people who like crystals
or whatever. You know, the cricuals are not for me.
And one of the example that I always say is like,
have you ever put on a robe and a weird
hat and walked up on a stage and walked across
the stage and taken a piece of paper from somebody
(14:44):
that's rolled up in a thing and then gotten off
the stage? And then everybody else did in the course?
Pople say oh, yeah, of course they've done that, And
I say, why why did you do that? What was
the point of the robe and everything? Because your coursework
was done these graduations like, of course we do that.
It's not like you don't graduate until put the robond typically,
So why do.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
We do things like that?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
And I mean every culture does things like this, especially
between childhood and adulthood, where they market somehow with you
were that and now you're this, And the question is
why do we do it?
Speaker 3 (15:16):
So we don't do that to four year olds.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
We're aware that they're too little to be adults, so
we don't say you put the robond on your four
and now you're supposed to be an adult. We do
it when the moment is around, when we're ready, and
that's when we say, okay, now you're going to go
from being a kid to an adult. And I think
the same with our careers as well. You know, when
we get promotions, you don't typically get promoted to tenure
(15:38):
of the day you start, because you just started.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
You're not ready really for the other responsibilities.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
So back when you were saved tenure, do you remember
doing anything or changing anything differently to help support that
change in self identity.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
I think tenure is funny because there's not a ceremony
like retirement. We typically don't have an official thing. You
might have like a cake or something like that, but
we don't have like ceremonies for promotions in the way
that we do for retirements, which is just interesting. I
did have an experience that I for some reason it's
so vivid to me, where I was in a meeting
(16:14):
with maybe like fifteen other people around a table and
the meeting wasn't starting, and I was kind of like,
what why is this meeting get started now? Like what
are we waiting for? Looking at the clock and stuff
like that, And then I realized that I was the
oldest person and had tenure, and so everybody was waiting
for me to do it because it was the oldest
person here. I think they should start the meeting. But
(16:34):
you see these things where you also get conferred upon
you now other people will see you differently as well.
It isn't just that I see myself differently. It's that
now the world says, oh, he's.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
A different person.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Now we have different expectations for him. He's supposed to
do different things. That can be like a nightmare, like
how I God, I'm trapped, or it's a reflection of where.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
You are in your life, and it means truly, hopefully.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
I am a little bit different, you know, than I
was when I was twenty five, now that I have tenure.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Yeah, that's interesting. I'm also thinking about my own life
where I recently shifted into a slightly different role in
my business. I was in this acting CEO role and
now I've put someone else in that role and I've
moved back to more of a creative kind of role.
And I remember when that happened, I completely rearranged my desk,
(17:24):
my work set up, and shifted monitors around, and I
thought like, that will be really good to DeMar kate
the old me with the new me, because also I
need to behave differently in order to let the new
CEO do her job really well, I'm wondering, now should
I be creating some new rituals as well, because I'm
sure that there's many people listening that maybe have just
(17:46):
changed jobs or thinking about changing jobs, or what should
I be thinking about now in terms of continuing like
using rituals to shift my self identity.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
It's funny my research group here, which we creatively called
nerd Lab because.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
We're Nerds of the West.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yeah, we have a thing that's called Random Ideas Day,
and Random Ideas Day is everybody has to bring in
an idea about humans, about how humans work, like as
broadly defined as you possibly could, and share it with
the group and we brainstorm about it. But the rule
is you cannot work on that idea. It's random ideas
And it's like it seems maybe like a waste of time,
(18:23):
you know, bring ideas and then you to throw them away.
But what we're trying to do is say the most
important thing is being creative, but coming up with ideas
is the currency. It's not writing stuff or doing statistics
that s it's all important or whatever.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
That's not what it is though.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
It's actually the creativity that's really valued, that we really
care about and celebrate. The job is come up with
as many ideas as you can. They don't be good,
they don't have to be bad. So we're using that
ritual to really try to communicate we're supposed to be
a creative, supportive community. And I think for you as well,
you can think about what are the rituals you put
in place. If the value that you have is creativity,
(19:00):
what are you going to put in place every day
or every week by yourself or with other people that
shows like, no, no, this is creative time. It's not
the email time, it's not the meetings time. This is
the creative time. And even just carving space like that
out is incredibly valuable because I mean every organization is
like we're a learning organization or we're innovative or whatever,
(19:22):
and then you look at what people do every day
and so it's not reflected in any of the tasks
that people do. There's nothing that your employees do that
have anything to do with the values you're saying. So
of course it's not going to happen until you start
putting things in place where you say, you know what,
every Friday at two o'clock is innovation time, whatever that means.
I'm just riffing, but you know you really have to
say no, no, We're going to put these structures into
(19:44):
place so we give people time and space to do
the thing that we're all hoping that they do.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
I like that approach. We will be back with Michael
soon where he talks me through how we can develop
powerful rituals at work that drive connection to our team
and also motivation for what we do. If you're looking
for more tips to improve the way you work can live.
I write a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've
(20:12):
discovered that have helped me personally. You can sign up
for that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com.
I do want to delve into rituals at work because
I was really intrigued around some of the things that
you're writing there, and you gave a lot of interesting
(20:34):
examples around different rituals that were in different workplaces, and
when I was reading them, I kind of noticed that
a lot of them felt like they were dependent on
being face to face. Now that we're in this hybrid
world and certainly my organization is remote. First, we gave
up all our office leases. I'd love to know what
are some of the most interesting rituals that you've seen
(20:57):
that can happen in a remote environment.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
You know what's so funny is I signed this contract
to write this book in January of twenty twenty and
thinking of the world as it was in January of
twenty twenty and the world in twenty twenty four is
just with work.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
It's just like it's a completely different world.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
It's there's so much less face to face, there's so
much everything, and so you could imagine that when everything
goes online, what people do is say, we don't need
any rituals, like those are a waste of time anyway,
let's skip them.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Now that we're online.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Even with something like weddings, you know, you could be like,
you know what, weddings were a pain, Let's not do
weddings now that we're online. It's not what people do, like,
how do we make a wedding online? Right? We bring
it to the medium and try to make it work.
And we saw that at work too. There's a team
I talked to you that I love that they started
doing when they went remote. They started doing at the
beginning of every zoom meeting, everyone would click the emoji
(21:49):
that reflected how they were feeling. You could also see,
is anybody not doing well? You know, maybe I should
follow up with them, But in a very low stakes way.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
It wasn't like a ason.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
As you clicked sad emoji, everyone was like, boom, you know,
let's focus on him right now and make sure right
that's the worst and that What was so cool about
this team was they hadn't done anything like that before
they went online.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
It wasn't like they.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Had a ritual in person where they would check in
with each other.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
They didn't at all.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
They just started meetings and so they used the different
medium to create a ritual that actually was fantastic for
them that never would have occurred to them before.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
What did you do with the nerd Lab during the
COVID times when presumably you were all remote?
Speaker 2 (22:31):
We went remote and we tried to do random ideas
as well. One of the things that we love to
do is the quick conversations that happened at the beginning
of meetings where just randomly you and I happen to
show up first and we chat for two minutes and
the number to go to get there. Of course, with zoom.
That doesn't happen. You're all in the screen at once.
You can't have one conversation because it's somebody's watching. So
(22:52):
we started doing things like before the meeting started, if
you got there, you just got like zipped into a
room with somebody else, to try to simulate those random,
little quick conversations before the meeting. It was just supposed
to be the like, hey, how's it going. We're here first,
So we did a little bit of that, And what
we're trying to do there is again spur the quick
conversation between people that you might not otherwise chat with
(23:15):
and just see what comes of it, you know, see
if anything ideas come out of it or collaborations come
out of it that might not have otherwise. So we're
trying the best we could to sort of engineer the
same spirit. What we're trying to do was use the
medium as best we could to still have some of
the things that we loved.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Were there any other ritels you found? What's well is.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
Ritels for the grave when you're remote, for sure.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
I think one of the most important things is like
if I go to a company and chat with people
there and I say rituals or something like that. Most
employees roll their eyes and they're like, oh my god,
because they think I mean like corporate retreats or even worse,
like the nightmare manager of the world is the one
who comes in on Monday and is like, I heard
a podcast or I saw a Ted talk and now
(23:59):
we're going to do everything like this from now you know,
Oh my god, you know, here they go again. And
so what we have seen that when rituals are mandated
from on high, they really can lead to reactance. Employees
are like, I'm not going to do that stupid.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
I mean, I'll do it because you're my boss, but
it's not going to resonate with me emotionally. The ones
that people really value are actually the ones that come
from the bottom up, from employees themselves, from the teams themselves.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
It's not going to work.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Can do them with kids either, you know, it just
doesn't work in the world to do that. So it
is this kind that bubble up from the creativity of teams,
often based on again, the values that they really care about.
There was a team that we say, is there anything
you do that's unique to your team that special? You
make sure to do it every so often, lots of
teams say yes. This one team described as a very
(24:49):
elaborate thing they did with lunch, which was five days
in the week. I think five people on the team,
so one person was responsible for lunch every day, so
they'd bring it in. You know, I was Monday, you
were two, and we did that every single week. And
in any case, it's just lunch. We're just going to
eat lunch. It's not a big deal. But what the
team is doing is they're saying, like, one day a week,
I take care of everyone on the team, and every
(25:11):
other day of the week someone on the team takes
care of me with food. It could be anything, but
it's with food. What are they doing there. They're taking
lunch and turning it into something that means they care
about each other and they're supportive of each other. And
the reason I think of that example is because if
management said here's a chart and everyone has to get
lunch for it, you know what, I mean your Friday
(25:32):
and you too, you know, I mean to be a
night like, oh my god, what if you do this?
So you can see the real difference between coming from
employees versus coming from on high.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
What are those key ingredients for a good ritual at work.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
The idea is to give people the space to be
creative and do things that mean something to them rather
than tell them exactly what to do. So you can think,
how do you start meetings, how do you end meetings?
What do you do for meals? What do you do
after work together? Do you have any little inside jokes
that you have on your team that other teams don't have.
Do you have a little shared language that you use.
(26:07):
We can just get them starting to think about their
culture in their team, even a three person team. We
can get them thinking about how are we the same
and how are we different from other teams? And most
teams will say, well, you know what, actually we do
this thing a little bit differently than other teams do it,
whatever it might be. Those are the great places to
start with building a ritual because you're already saying there's
something about our team that's unique, and we're just going
(26:29):
to kind of build it out a little bit and
value it a little bit more.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
It probably leads me on to asking about routines versus rituals,
which you talk more about in the context of relationships.
But I also wonder if it might be relevant for
work as well, where some things are just well, this
is just a routine instead of a ritual. Can you
explain the difference and why it matters.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
We had the saddest finding that we ever had was
with relationship rituals, where we get both members of a
couple and we ask them questions separately so they can't
hear what their partner told us. And we asked them,
you know, do you have anything just like we do
with teams actually it work. Do you have anything that's
special to the two of you that's unique that you
make sure to do every so often, every day, every week,
(27:12):
every month. Most couples say both. They both say yes, yes,
we do have something like that, and they tell us
what it. We clink the silverware or whatever.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
It might be.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
A small percent of couples they both say no, like
we just don't have anything like that. But there's this
percent of couples that are the saddest, which are we
ask one person do you have anything like this, and
they're like, oh, my god, we totally do. What we
do is the sunrise in the morning and then we
take a swim and it's you know what I mean.
They're really describing this, and then we have the other
person they're like, no, we don't do anything like that,
(27:41):
and that mismatch is so painful, but it shows you
that the same exact activity can either be a really
meaningful ritual or a routine. It isn't actually the actions themselves.
Sunrise happens no matter what. Doesn't matter if it's a
ritual or not for you. But some people turn it
into something more and other people kind of just see
(28:03):
it as a routine, and I think, again, that's what
you're bringing to it. A couple that one person said,
every weekend we go food shopping, and you know, we
pick the meals for the week, and we think about
who we're going to have over for dinner and what
they would like to have to eat. So we're really
kind of building our week together with shopping. And the
other person was like, I guess we go shopping nothing
(28:26):
in it, you know what I mean. So you see
these mismatches between couples, and I think for us, it's
like try to get on the same page if you
possibly can. And I don't know the story specificly behind
that couple, but you can imagine one person's a foodie,
so food is like really meaningful to them, and the
other person doesn't care about food, So that's not a
good place to try the ritual, right, It has to
(28:48):
be things that we both value that reflects something about
both of us. Those can be the better places to go.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
And is that often what's happening there Where someone says
it as a ritual and someone says it as a
retain there's just a mismatch in what matters to that
person or their values, or is it potentially a sign
of deeper relationship dissatisfaction.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
If we ask people, do you have a ritual like this?
And then we ask people questions about how satisfied are
you with your relationship? How committed do you feel, and
how committed do you think your partner is. The presence
of a ritual or not is a pretty good predictor
of all of those things. Meaning, if you have one,
those things are higher, and if you don't have one,
(29:30):
those things are lower. There's a lot of information contained
within the fact that we have this special thing that
we do that only we do, and we do it
every day or every week or every month. They really
are a sign of something much deeper. In fact, the
funniest maybe the funniest thing we ever found was we
asked people about their relationship rituals, and then we said,
(29:51):
how would you feel if you broke up and your
partner reused it? And you've I mean, people are horre
I mean the anger. And and it's because if you say,
how would you feel if they start dating someone new?
How would you feel if they marry someone new? You
don't like that, but they're allowed. But if you say,
if they reused your four clinking thing like murder, I
(30:12):
mean you're dead to me. And again that shows it's
just a tiny little thing, but so much is bound
in them. They're so emotional and so important to us.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
So in terms of the satisfaction or the improvement in
relationship satisfaction that rituals bring, do you find that that
result translates to the workplace as well in terms of
having rituals as an organization or with our team.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
We do see with teams where we ask them, it's
so funny. It's the same questions, do you have something
special and unique and you do it?
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Every so often?
Speaker 2 (30:42):
The teams that tell us they do have higher job satisfaction.
But one of the things that we really see is
that they see more meaning in their work, and it
partly happens because they see the ritual as meaningful. In
other words, lunch isn't just lunch, it's meaningful. It means
something to me. These the people on my team are
meaningful to me. The work that we do is meaningful
(31:02):
to me. And that's pretty consistent that we see across
these things. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that if you
start a ritual tomorrow, you're now going to see your
work as incredibly meaningful instantly, right, That's not how they work,
but again very strong signal, just like with romantic relationships,
that the presence of one of these means all sorts
of things about how you feel about your work, where
(31:24):
if you don't have one of them, those things can
be much much lower.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
One of my favorite studies, probably my favorite one in
the Ritual Effect, which i'd love to finish on, is
where you described how the task was for participants to
write about February seven and February fourteen and what happened
on both days. Can you talk a bit about that
research and what came out of that and importantly, what
(31:50):
are the implications for us in terms of using rituals
to be great as just savoring moments in life.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
My colleague at HBS ting Xiong, came into my office
one day and she said, why do people make time capsules?
Speaker 3 (32:04):
And I was like, I have no idea.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
I mean, we take things, we put them in a
thing and bury it and then sometimes later we dig
it up, but more often somebody else is supposed.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
To dig it up later.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
What do we literally, what are we doing? Why are
we burying things in the ground. I mean, it's a
crazy It's like when dogs do that, We're like, well
that's weird, but we do it all the time. And
so she was so interested in that phenomenon, and she
got onto this idea of rediscovery as being something that's
really powerful for us and the study that The funniest one,
as you said, that she came up with was she
(32:36):
asked people to write about their day. And it's on
different days. So some people, she says, February seventh, write
about your day, and other people, she says, write about
your day on February fourteenth, which is Valentine's Day. And
she asks people, I'm going to take those descriptions from you,
and in a couple of months. Which one do you
think you'd be interested in reading? The Valentine's Day one
(32:57):
or the one.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
From February seventh.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Most people say, oh, the Valentine's Day one, because it's
a special day and all this kind of stuff. But
then when time passes and you ask them again, they say, well,
I kind of remember Valentine's Day. I have no idea
what happened on February seventh, And that's the one that
they really want to read. And when they read it,
they say, oh my god, I completely forgot about that
weird guy that did the weird thing at work, you know.
I mean, these things come back to us that are
(33:20):
very mundane, and that's what's so important actually, is it's
rediscovering mundane things, and that feeling of rediscovery is a
completely free source of joy that we completely don't take
advantage of. We tend to focus on the big things
like the wedding instead of the fork clinking. I think
it really is this general thing where the big things
are important and big, but these little, everyday, daily things
(33:43):
sometimes can add up to something really special as well.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Mike, thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge
about rituals. Find it absolutely fascinating. It's got me thinking
really differently about the things that I do consciously and
often unconsciously in my life and life relationships and at work.
And I just wanted to say thank you for sharing
your knowledge with me today.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Thank you so much for self funder chat.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
I hope that this chat with Michael prompted some thinking
for you about the rituals that you have at your
work and also in your life. And if you're keen
to learn more about Richel's I highly recommend grabbing a
copy of Michael's latest book, The Ritual Effect. If you
like today's show, make sure you hit follow on your
podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How
(34:32):
I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the
Warrangery people part of the Cool and Nation are big
thank you to my editor Rowena Murray and Martin Nimmer
for doing the sound mix.
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