How to use the power of ritual to increase profit and fulfilment.

When you hear the word ‘ritual’ what comes to mind?

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and see what pictures, thoughts or stories emerge.

Maybe you see images of age-old cultures, such as the Mayans, the Aztecs, or the Ancient Egyptians, and your mind goes to pictures of animal sacrifice?

Perhaps you recall your last trip to church and start humming a hymn to yourself.

You may even think of your own rituals, like only wearing a specific shirt to a pitch, or eating at the same place on the way to a sporting event.

Wherever your mind takes you, I bet it isn’t to ideas about how to make money!

But here’s the thing… by seeing ritual as a kind of superstitious or spiritual activity, we miss the full story. A rich and emotive story that holds the key to happy, productive and creative life experiences – both at home and at work.

Intrigued?

Good!

So, what role can rituals play in life and business?

The foundations of ritual

Rituals are an intrinsic part of the human experience. They help build a sense of belonging, good will and togetherness.[i]

Put simply, rituals are a means of setting an intention and focusing your attention on it.[ii]

Effective rituals are built on something that has powerful meaning, such as marking a key transition like from boyhood to manhood, or life to death. They arouse your body, your mind or your emotions. They have a set of prescribed actions and they are led by a particular person.[iii]

Great rituals deliver on these promises in a way that is balanced, giving those who engage with them a sense of interdependence, building harmony and developing creative thought.[iv]

Poor rituals either don’t deliver on these promises, or they do so in such a prescriptive way that they kill the creativity and create more negatives than positives.[v]

Rituals in practise: church

Isn’t ritual just another word for religious or spiritual practises? I used to think so. In fact, as a boy, I made that connection so deeply, that I rejected any notion of ritual, based on my experience of mass.

Have you ever been to, or seen, a mass?

When you think of one, what images come to mind?

Do you see a cloud of incense, being swung by a priest or an altar boy? What about people kneeling in tandem? Maybe you see people lining up to take communion?

As a kid, I used to go to church every Sunday. I was an altar boy for quite a while, too.

The only thing that got me through what was, to me, a dreary and banal waste of time was my moment of glory. Two key moments, at the beginning and end of mass, where I would walk up the aisle and swing the incense as far and as high as I could.

Ah, the childish pleasures of youth!

Like many kids, I went to mass because I had to. Partly to make my parents happy, and partly to gain some sense of acknowledgement from the priest and the congregation… not exactly in keeping with the essence of such a sacred ritual.

With that kind of formative experience, how do you perceive the idea of ritual? Is it something you look forward to and enjoy, or something that you’d reject as soon as possible?

While ritual plays an important part in life, it needs a sense of meaning. The only meaning I got as a young boy was that mass was something everyone did, without really thinking about it. I mean the priest even called us his flock. Would you want to be seen as a sheep being herded by some old codger, when you were a kid? I didn’t think so. The only way I could see to get through it was to enjoy that incense as much as possible!

It was the rigidity, formality and lack of personal meaning that made mass such a negative experience. It’s what led me to lock away the concept of ritual in a box and forget about it. Passing it off as something for ‘them,’ not something for me.

Rituals in practise: personal development

In my early-20s, I started getting really into the idea of personal development and became a bit of a workshop addict.

The big draw of personal development is to become the best version of yourself. It’s a business that makes you believe that the courses, books and processes will help you ‘find the real you.’

They offer you a chance to become whole.

You go for the courses; you stay for the connections… the sense of belonging and camaraderie… to feel part of a tribe.

I was hooked on the sense of certainty and comfort it all provided. I felt like these courses held the answers to life’s deepest questions. By taking part, doing the work, and getting more fully immersed in them, I would stop feeling so lost, alone and unsure of myself.

I travelled the world and experimented with as many ‘modalities’ as I could find. Each time, I’d get a hit of awakening and then I’d end up falling back into old habits and patterns of behaviour. Whenever I would catch myself in these old grooves, I’d get myself on to another course.

Until my 30s, I had seen the personal development world as a separate part of my life. I felt like there was ‘the real world’ and there was ‘the personal development world’. One was dystopian, the other utopian.

It wasn’t until I had been around the loop several times that I started to piece a few things together. While I said I was going on personal development courses for insight, what I was really going for was the rituals that occurred. My emotional and intellectual arousal was more to do with the ritual processes than I had admitted to myself before.

Rituals in practise: work

When I looked at work examples, I saw that the things I enjoyed the most were the rituals.

When you hear someone say, “It’s been a long week… do you fancy coming to the pub with the rest of us for a few?”, how do you feel? Excited? Anxious? Part of the tribe?

If you’re anything like me, I’d put money on the fact that you have quite a few happy memories connected to such times. I’d also take a gamble that you have a few more ‘hazy’ memories, too.

The weekly ‘debrief at the pub’ was a key ritual for me and my teams.

This meant time, space and approval to let off steam together and bond. The best examples of these were when senior management would come along and put a credit card behind the bar – it was like they were saying, “We know you’ve had a bit of a slog, here’s a gesture of our gratitude and thanks.”

It’s amazing how something as seemingly profane as this can have such a profound and positive impact on your well being and sense of worth. That a few drinks in a pub could have such a positive impact strikes me as miraculous.

Another of my favourite work rituals is pitching. While many people are filled with dread at the idea of pitches, I see them as truly special. They’re an important rite of passage.

Pitching, in many ways, is like cultural traditions that use trials (hunting, wilderness survival, walking on hot coals, etc.) to identify when a child enters adulthood.

Can you stay cool, calm and collected under the stress and pressure?

Will you be able to perform at your best, when all eyes are on you?

Will you remember the script and deliver your part in the right order and in a way that pleases the judges, the elders in cultural terms?

Will you emerge victorious, or will you be faced with a crushing feeling of failure?

How will you manage that feeling of failure?

Just saying all of that makes my heart race… as if I’m preparing for a pitch.

With the heightened physical and emotional sensations, you get to see yourself in a new light. You get to find yourself at your edge and the team you’re pitching with do too.

Great companies make a ritual out of the completion of a pitch.

Win or lose, they create time for those involved to blow off the steam they’ve built up. They recognise the work that has been put into it, thanking the team for their work. They also allow for people to share what they saw in themselves and the team, so that no matter the result of the pitch everyone is able to gain something positive from the experience.

In this way, a great pitch has nothing to do with whether it is won and has everything to do with how it is used to develop each individual and the team.

A transformative example of this was a pitch I did several years ago.

I was developing a pitch for a gym brand, looking into data around New Year’s Resolutions. A couple of questions sat at the heart of the inquiry:

1.    How many people make New Year’s Resolutions?

2.    How many keep them?

The data was really interesting.

Just over half of us (53%) make New Year’s Resolutions, with health being the primary focus.

Of those who make resolutions, just under half (43%) will have given up in less than a month, two thirds (66%) would make the first month, and nearly 9 in 10 (88%) would not last three months.

Source: YouGov/Pier Marketing (December 2014)

Sound familiar? I bet it does!

The pitch focused on the obstacles that got in the way of people maintaining their goals and the tactics that could be used to overcome them – looking to behavioural science as a means of finding an insight.

Accountability – sharing your goals with a friend (or multiple friends) and committing to support each other – was what science told us was the answer.

While this was true, it wasn’t until a few months later that I realised there was another part to this story.

The very act of setting up accountability with your friend(s) is a ritual. A ritual of deep meaning, that says I need you and you need me. It’s a deeply vulnerable, collaborative and creative ritual, where the tribe must come together to ensure success. It’s what academics would call a ritual of synchrony and collaboration.

Making resolutions is a ritual. A ritual that is often not performed with ritual intent. It’s made into a routine – something to be done at the beginning of the year… something to tick off… something, in many ways, that reflects my experience of mass when I was a kid.

The story doesn’t stop there.

‘Resolutions’ were, at one point, part of a ritual to invoke divine guidance and support for the new year. There was sense of awe and wonder behind it. There was a surrender.

Nowadays, we’ve lost touch with that meaning. The unwritten rule is that no one is going to keep this resolution, so it’s a good way of us bonding over how crap we are at keeping them. It has become an excuse to stay stuck.

This is the thing with rituals. If you don’t maintain their meaning, they will either disappear, or the meaning will be replaced with something else.

When you realise that, you’ll be able to find rituals that have meaning for you and that will support you in moving toward whatever goal you have.

Summary

There are five core elements that create great rituals.

1.    Great rituals have meaning beyond superstition and spirituality; this meaning needs to be reinforced, or it will be lost

2.    Great rituals have a sense of ceremony, not so much that it gets in the way, but not so little that it isn’t recognisable

3.    Great rituals give all participants a sense of ownership of the process, mixing dictated and debated elements

4.    Great rituals build and maintain culture; by doing things together, you support collaboration, harmony and creativity

5.    Great rituals arouse our mind, body and emotions, they form part of our DNA

Creating rituals for your personal and professional lives

Hopefully you now see how important and powerful rituals can be.

There are three keys to using the power of ritual to increase profit and fulfilment:

1.    Uncover the needs, beliefs and values that drive you

Do you need to feel more connected to yourself, your family, or your colleagues?

Maybe you need a sense of certainty that everyone is on the same page.

You may believe that tension is vital for creativity, or you may believe it stifles it.

Perhaps you value frank communication, while others prefer politeness.

Whatever your situation, it is important to uncover these three things (needs, beliefs and values) so that you can integrate them into the rituals you create.

In the men’s groups I hold, we have a set of ground rules that indicate the values of the space, while allowing for people to haggle around them and have their individual needs met. This gives every man a sense of ownership and supports a harmonious experience.

2.    Identify milestone moments at work and at home

With many of us working from home during the pandemic, it can be challenging to mark the transition from home time to work time and back again.

Creating a ritual that marks the end of one period and the beginning of another will help you shift gears and give your mind, body and emotions a chance to shift accordingly.

If you’re wanting to lose weight, or focus on health, you can turn cooking and eating into ritual experiences, too.

Likewise, if you’re struggling with creating enough quality time with your partner, or your family, adding ritual ingredients to otherwise mundane activities can really improve their impact. Remember, ritual is about intention and attention.

If you’re in a work environment, you might want to consider how you can add ritual elements to things like hiring, onboarding, firing, weekly updates, team meetings, performance reviews.

3.    Add relevant, useful and simple ritual ingredients to these moments

These ingredients should be filled with meaning. Meaning that is based on your needs, beliefs and values.

These ingredients don’t need to be complex or elaborate. In fact, it is best that they are not.

In the men’s groups I hold, we start and finish the sessions with 2 minutes of silence. This helps mark the start and end of the session as well as giving us time to ‘arrive’ – the silence gives our minds, bodies and emotions time to settle, so we can be fully present.

The impact of ritual: a brief testimonial

As one of my clients, ‘Vikki,’ recently shared about her company’s experience of ritual,

“The new means of sharing our thoughts and feelings meant that we didn’t descend into a fight, nor did we descend into woo-woo land. It was very real and very grounded.

We uncovered a deeper sense of ourselves and each other… I can’t describe how much more fun, exciting, interesting and united the place feels.”

When you create a safe space for people to bring all of themselves into being, you open up the possibility of much deeper connections.

These connections make you feel more trust for each other, which promotes genuine collaboration. That collaboration nurtures everyone’s creative energy.

That creativity not only means better output, but also means you are delivering that output in happier and more fulfilling environments.

In other words, when done right, ritual increase productivity and creativity, which increases profit and fulfilment.

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