CM 264: Michael Norton on How Rituals Improve Our Lives
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We can't just sum in emotions automatically. If I were anxious, I wish I could just say, become, and I would magically become, or if I was feeling sad, I would be great if I could just say, be happy and boom, I was happy or not built that way for Better and for worse. We have to do things to change our mood.

And we do all kinds of things to change. You know, we go and talk to friends, we take medicine, we do all these sorts of things. But one of the things that humans do to change their mood is they turn to rituals.

Welcome to curious minds at work on your host, gale Allen. Research shows we create meaning and purpose, yet gaining them can seem beyond us. Fortunately, scientists who have studied the power of ritual have found that there are more in our control than we think.

In this interview, I talked to one of the scientist, psychologist Michael norton. He, there's how rituals, especially ones we create, can provide the meaning and purpose that we grave. And unlike habits, rituals Operate an emotional level that deepen cy experience.

In his book, the ritual effect, from habit to ritual, harness the surprising power of everyday actions, norn shares what runs are, why they matter, and how they can help bulls us throughout our lives. Before we start one quick ask, if you like the podcast, please take a moment to leave a rating on itunes or whatever you subscribe. Your feedback sounds a strong signal to people looking for their next podcast. And now here's my interview with Michael norton. Michael norton, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me on.

There are aspects of rituals that resemble habits, but they're different. And the differences between them, as you point out in your book, are important. How do they differ and why does that matter?

Can I start by asking you a question? sure. So if you think about, uh, you either your morning routine or your routine before you go to bed at night, do you shower first and then brush your teeth, or do you brush your teeth and then shower.

brush the teeth and then shower every time? yes.

And how would you feel if I said tonight or tomorrow morning, you mind just flipping the order of those in doing them in the opposite way?

I'd feel little discomposed later and then I would say, all right, i'm in you okay so like .

a little twins of um rather rather but of course I can and obviously it's just right so it's funny so so first stuff, if I ask people um there you know do brush and shower, shower and brush almost always about half of people do IT one way and half of people do IT the other way which is just to be like, I mean, i'm such a nerd social scientists so interesting that humans haven't decided, you know, what the right order is.

But then I think it's the second question I asked you that I think is is for me more interesting, which is, does IT bother you if I ask you to switch the order. And there again, about half of people say, doesn't bother me at all, no problem. And about half of people say something like you said, which is discomposing later or uncomfortable or i'd rather not.

Or if I did IT that way, I wouldn't feel ready to start the day. I would feel off all day. And for me, that's a little bit the difference between habits and rituals. That usually people think rituals is like people in robes with candles, chanting, and that far down the spectrum of ritual.

But as soon as things start to mattered, like the order in which you do them and when you do them, those are things that they start to have more meaning and more emote. You can feel the emotion in yourself, then just habits, which are usually kind of dry. We got, got to get them done. You know, I have to clean my face and clean my body every day. So i'll just doing whatever order when you move toward the um i'm not i'm not sure i'd like to do IT this way or if I can't do IT my way, i'll feel weird you're moving toward the rural and of the spectrum where these really basic actions is just moving your hands and some soap things like that come to be reviewed with more emotion and more meaning.

Well, you have a great there's a great quote from your book that that speaks to what you're talking about and you write, I see rituals as one of humanities most efficient tools for summoning the wider possible range of our emotional repertory.

We have, unfortunately, this thing in how we built that we can't just sum in emotions automatically. If I were anxious, I wish I could just say, become, and I would magically become, or if I was feeling sad, I would be great if I could just say, be happy and boom, I was happy, were not built that way. For Better and forwards, we have to do things to change our mood.

And we do all kinds of things to change our mood. You know, we go and talk to friends, we take medicine, know we do all these sorts of things. But one of the things that humans do to change their mood is they turn to rituals in so many different situation.

If you think about a funeral where we use that ritual because we're feeling so sad and we want to try to start the grieving process, but if you think of a wedding, it's ritual. But we're using that actually to born two people together and have a really fun time. So across all of these domaines of life, we see when people are looking to feel a certain way.

But IT can be any kind of way. IT can be to emp ourselves up before a big game. IT can be to calm ourselves down before a big game. We still use rural. And that, to me, is why there's such a visible tool because it's not just you do a ritual and you feel x, it's like you do a ritual and we use IT to feel X, Y, Z, A, B, C.

Mick explained that IT takes effort to create a ritual, and you just called out to that clearly, take a lot of effort. You put a funeral together. You put a wedding together.

IT takes some thought. IT takes some reflection, hopefully, on what your goals are for that event, what you want that experience to be like for the people attending. And in your book, you explain that this effort really matters .

why it's funny, because we tend to think, you know, you think of a funeral or a wedding or a holiday in the U. S. A holiday like thanksgiving.

What comes to mind is kind of a prototype. You know, oh, weddings are this thing and thanksgiving is like this. But then when you look at how people actually create their own, they're very not standard.

I mean, some elements are the same. You know that a wedding, maybe there's a cake, but almost anything else can change around that. Is do you walk up the eye or not, religious or not? Whose there, who officiates all of these other things around the wedding are things that we freeLance.

And it's the same with funerals. We freeLance around funerals as well. We follow a little bit the standard path, but we always personalize them to the person that we lost.

And that was one of the key insights for me, actually, in my research, is that IT is true, that we receive rituals, tradition, culture and religion, and those can be incredibly important in our lives and a huge source of meaning. And at the same time, we're kind of creative with them. We kind of make our own.

We kind of say, you know, if the funeral, this person loved A C, D C, let's blast A C, D. C during the funeral. Because this is what this guy totally love.

Now there is no thousand year old text that says they are easy for many reasons. What do they went around? But we decide, no, this is what we'll do to honor them. And I do think that when we invest ourselves and creating IT, as you ve said, it's more personal IT makes IT more meaningful to us. And I think across domains of life, we see people pulling from tradition for sure, and then also financing or divine the rituals themselves.

There's a great story that you telling your book about the advent of cake mix. Tell us about that in the connection to what we've been talking about.

So I had a few years ago, I noticed that I had this horrible looking stones sculpture that I about the literally thirty years ago, and it's moved with me everywhere i've gone, even though it's terrible. I mean, really ugly, not being shot application. I I present like a really terrible ble looking sculpture.

And at one point I said, you know, why am I if someone had given me that, I don't think I would keep packing IT up and bringing me with me. So why am I logging this thing around with me all the time when I know it's not really that good? And the idea is, of course, well, I made, you know, when we make things ourselves, we can, we show on our research, ended up calling at the ik a effect.

But when we make things ourselves, we imbue them with more value and more emotion. You could say it's more than they deserve, like my terrible stones sculpture. But I don't think about IT like that.

I think about IT as when we create, we inview things with meaning. And that's actually a very lucky thing that we are able to do. And the cake mix story was in the fifties when everything started to be instant.

Everything you know, that was the thing at the time. Housewives were busy. And so you wanted to have like instant dinner and TV dinner and all these things that were fast, which makes a ton of sense to save time.

But they found that when they released these cake mixes and all that required was adding water, then they interviewed women who are making these cakes, and they said, I don't feel like i'm really taking care of my family. It's it's too easy. And I don't feel like i'm fulfilling my role as a caretaker at this time.

Course, he was very gender that IT was you women making the cakes? eeta. But if you think about that, what you should say, oh h my god, I have to do this work.

This is terrific. But instead we have something in is that says, this isn't enough. You know, IT matters to me, that IT matters to all of us, that we take care of our families.

And if things they're too easy, I can feel like i'm not taking care of my family. And so literally, what they did was they added a step which was put in a in the only by the way, it's still that way today. If you do cake mix, it's like water and egg is sometimes oil, but that's pretty much IT.

It's from you know seventy years now we decided all you add the egg and you're all a good, but you can see how you know cracking the egg is a little bit of effort starring IT is a little bit of and IT makes IT your you're baking. You know you're not just doing a prety mate thing. You're creating something for your family. It's the same involve as my silly stone sculpture where I want to invest effort and things so that they could become more meaningful to me.

You know one of the other things in your book that I I just it's an area that's a particular interest to me and it's about athletes and performance. And so was really gobbling up that section on athletes rituals. And so.

We've got athlete to create rituals for performance. I think, you know you talk about baseball players, I think a lot about tennis players. What are the most successful athletes gain from their rituals? IT sounds like you know they're putting but they're looking for something really hyper specific, right? Certain outcome, say one of achieve, how does that work for them?

A fun way to waste an afternoon is to think of any celebrity or any athlete you like and type in their name and then the word ritual and hit search. You're going to find a IT, not for everybody, of course, but you're going to find amazing stories about what these high performers do you syrian and Williams rapped on at all kids, Richard. You know, any anywhere you look, these performers are engaged in these really, really elaborate rituals.

The doll is famous. If you're tennis fan, you know what he does before every serve. It's like six hundred movements, including he picks his wedding every time.

And I think about that, as you know, when we see people doing these incredibly stressful, difficult things, we actually allow, we culturally allow them to engage in these very idiosyncracy behaviors. And we noticed them, but we don't really judge them. But if I, before I started teaching a class, did the whole of all thing take my way, i'm not allowed, right?

People say, I mean, I guess teaching is hard, but you know, it's not it's not the french open that we're dealing with here. So it's interesting to me that we we kind of see in the world how stressful things are, and we allow some people to do really elaborate rituals. And other people, we say, no, you're not really allowed to do one, but what we do see is that people still do them themselves.

It's just they do them in private. We won't show them to other people because people might say what who do you think you're at rapping at all? So what people do before a big meeting or a big presentation, it's it's incredibly common that people go into the bathroom check, make sure like look under the storm, make sure nobody y's there and then talk to themselves in the mirror. You can do this.

You've got this yeah and that sounds like, you know i'm sure that depends on how you do the ritual, what you put into IT. But but IT seems like IT can impact performance in a positive way.

And if you think about you know what what compared to what do you know of me? So if there were some magical solution that we knew could come your nerves immediately, and IT was, I don't know, pressing a button in six times, and people said, now want to go on the bathroom and yellow at myself in the myo, we might say, hey, that's a little, you know, there's this thing that we know IT works.

What do you are doing yelling yourself in the mirror? But the fact is that for most emotions that we're looking for, we don't have a perfect solution on how to get there. You sure you can take a pill to try to calm yourself down as well, but I often see rituals as when we're not exactly sure how to get where we need to be. One of the things we do, this tool idea, one of the things that we do, is turned to rich wall to see if they can help us along the path to whatever emotion we're trying to get to.

You know, there's an interesting way to think about that. You talk about, you know, pigeons and rain dances, and please feel free to share some of those stories. Can the rituals that we put in to practice actually change us?

I think the example of rain dances is incredibly important because there are many people who, in myself included, I have to say, who remain skeptical, but skeptical, as a kind word of the idea that rituals could do anything for us. You know, people say i'm a scientist and know there's no way i'm not a new aging milenio and I don't go to sana fy and get cycles. You just it's just not for me.

There's no way IT works and they'll point to things they'll point to practices and say there's no way this works, for example. So so the whole thing is kind of silly. So rain dances are a classic one where people will say, look, there is no way that people moving around on the ground are is going to cause IT physically to rain.

And i'm pretty sure that's true in the sense that we don't have any evidence that there are some link between what we do, you know, when we're dancing and what happens in the sky. But when you think about what those rain dances are doing, and they developed in cultures all over the world, particularly cultures where they experience unpredictable drought. So what's happening with those rituals is, when there's drought, what happens as the social fabric starts to free? Because we started to get very competitive with each other, because there's a very limited resource.

So what are these rituals do when we do these rain dances? They bring us back together as a community. They tell us, hey, this has happened before, even hundreds and thousands of years ago, and we got through IT together.

So we're doing this ritual today to honor the fact that we have a shared history. And we know that we can do this if we stick together now doesn't make IT rain, probably not. But that rural, that people might say is a waste of time, is absolutely an incredibly valuable and important thing for groups of people to do, because IT serves this other function. That's very, very important.

So in that sense, the ritual is changing us because it's actually helping us to see each other in a different way, given what's happening to us.

Exactly the person and you think about that work to the the co worker that you hate is either a random person that you hate to sits the next cubicle or it's a member of your team. And having someone as a member of your team is just very different. It's like having someone as a member of your family, you might then you know, they might drive you crazy.

You know what their political beliefs, that whatever might be. And yet, when you get together for thanksgiving, you can still enact the ritual and show, this is us. We are a family.

This is what we do. We always have this specific pie and this specific stuffing. And yes, that changes me from just a person in the world too, a member of a family, a number of a group, a number of a team at work.

What are ways that visuals can work against us and more specifically, maybe have a negative impact on performance?

If you think about even the um silly question I asked you about showing and brushing your teeth and people say, you know, if I do that in the order that I like, I feel really good. I feel like a ready to tack over the day. I feel like a ready to go, but if IT gets disrupted, so for example, if you have even eight year old, if you have children who love to disrupt original, you know, they have no respect for anything we're doing as parents.

They can come in and you know they grab the tooth base or whatever. And now your rituals disrupted. And what people say that is, well, now I feel off.

Now I feel weird and I feel like i'm not as ready for the day. I'm still gonna ve always go to work. But I just feel a little bit off.

And that even in that very simple example, you can see the benefits of rituals and the risks of rituals as well, that when we have them and we enact them, they can have really positive effects on us. But when they go wrong, they can have negative effects on us. And sometimes that would be Better if we didn't have IT at all. And just for neutral as opposed to this, I think that risk reward that we get when we have visuals where we think about the benefits and really importantly, as your pointing out, they can come with cost as well.

Yeah IT almost seems like every so often we should have something in our calendar that says maybe it's time to rethink this particular ritual howa going for yet .

because it's still working.

What's the connection, mike, between rituals and saverin other .

than celebrity, uh uh, rituals, one of the other most amusing things about these researchers to look the variety of things that people do with food because food and and drink are in a sense they're very utility arian by their nature, which is we need to be hydrated and we need calories. So, you know, you could eat any food in the world.

There's the soiled thing that was invented that supposed to have all the nucleus we need, but IT taste disgusting. So you can have that and fulfill every single utility arian need for food. But is that really what we're doing with food is all we're doing with food is just trying to get calories.

Of course, the answer is absolutely not. Another thing I asked people who say they don't even rituals. I say, have you ever made a cake and very carefully frosted IT. You, I mean, really carefully, deliberately frost IT. So IT looks really, really good.

And then as soon as you're done very carefully, frosting IT, you stick a bunch of wax candles and would like them on fire so that the wax gets all over the cake put is in front of a kid who then blow is probably got a cold or about to get a cold, who blows all the cake and all over the wax, then cut the cake and eat IT and people go, oh, of course, that's still, that's a birthday cake and then I was and say, oh, what bizarre our custom that is, why would we ever do that to a lovely cake that looks great and we know I right, it's like it's your birthday. You could just eat calories or you can put the candles in. The number of candles tells you how you're going from this person to this person on this day.

And we are all here to watch that and honor that with you. We're GTA think a very tuneless terrible song. You know, we're going to do all this stuff you're onna wish before you blow them out.

And that's a nice way to think about what you want in the coming year. You know I mean, it's just cake. All IT is is cake. But we're able to build so much emotion and meaning into food. IT allows us to save them and IT allows us to experience so many different emotions that, again, are hard to get up unless we have these situations to help us get there.

Well, and when you are describing that, I was thinking to myself how you could do the same thing the same way all the time. And for many years in a family, IT could actually counter up some great emotions, but there could be a time where IT does fall into the habit trap.

Is that right? That's right. I do think that sometimes we can get in a rut when people start engaging in actions and the meaning is lost. And we do see that happened. So in couples, for example, um in in the morning, you know one person will have a habit of bringing the other person coffee or tea and if really lovely you know I mean they do IT for decades.

And then there is an episode of this is us, which is a show that I like quite a bit where a guy explaining how he knew his marriage was over and he says, um you know, for years and years I brought her coffee every morning and one day I just didn't feel like IT. And the worst part was SHE didn't even notice. So when you think about what's happening there, he could keep bringing the coffee.

But if it's not doing the think IT was doing anymore, it's lost the connection between their love and this act of love. And when that's broken, you mean we have phrases like going through the motions on purpose, because those phones tell us exactly what can happen when the motions lose their meaning. And they just become these routine, boring behaviors without emotion in them.

In this interview, Michael norton talks about how rich als impact performance. If you'd like to learn more about performance, especially when IT comes to learning and mindset, check out episode two fifty, one of curious minds at work without water over seno, author of the book the performance paradox, know when we're curious, life is Better. We are expLoring more.

We're discovering more. We're experiencing insight than all. We're getting to know each other Better. And so we're developing deeper relationships. We experiences .

less anxiety and depression when they're struggle because we see those struggles more temporary and things, things that we can learn to overcome, not just that we can achieve more, which is important.

but is also that we have a much more joyful experience of life along the way. Let's get back to my interview with Michael north. What if the concepts of emersion and even consumption, what do they have to do with rural and saverin?

Sometimes when we eat, even when I am eating as well, we're completely distracted. You know you're on a call or your you're trying to type something as you're just like putting food in your face. You don't try to eat the food because we're really, really busy.

It's just the fact of life that we're really busy. We can always have a four our candle light dinner, you know and say for every single bike, we just can't. But when we take these little moments, we can actually immerse ourselves in the moment.

We can help ourselves be more present in the moment, not for four hours, who has the time, but even for one minute or five minutes. People do you asking on the morning with their coffee, with their tea. They make sure sometimes people do across word.

They read something for that couple of minutes. They make sure that theyve immerse themselves in the moment they're really saverin, not just the coffee, but the entire moment around the coffee. And that feeling of emerging. Actually, it's a great, great feeling that is a little hard to get out because we're so busy and so distracted. So these kinds of consumption rituals give us a little bit of an excuse to invest ourselves in a moment, even just for a moment before we go back to the hectic nature of life.

You share a story in the book of college students they're asked to put together time capsules, and I would love for you to tell that story. They're not really excited about doing IT, but in the act of doing IT, things change.

One of my favorite parts of my job is um that I get to work with lots of really smart, creative people who will kind of just wondering in my office with amazing ideas. It's like a really great, really, really lucky, lucky job. I feel very, very grateful to have this job.

And this project is one of those. My colleague, king jang, is a professor at H. B. S. With me, came in to my office one day and he said, he basically, he said, hey, what's the deal of time? I said, I said, I don't know.

And you said, you know, why would we take things that we like, put them in a thing and barrier so we can see them for decades, and then dig IT up later? And I said, my, I actually no idea like. And of course, through human history, we've been worrying things we like. It's something, not a new thing. Humans like to bury things we like and then dig them up later.

And so the question is, what what possible reason could there be to do that? And what we showed in that research is that when you kind of create a record of the moment right now and then varied, either metaphorically or, you know, send yourself an email six months later and see IT coming back to you, what can happen, which is really nice, is you forgotten those monday and details of that day. And we really, really like to rediscover them.

In fact, when we ask people to write about a day that they will remember anyway, like valentine's day, they don't really enjoy hearing about IT later because they didn't forget about IT. Yeah, of the roses ism. We went to that restaurant.

It's these little monday things about our day. If we bury them and bring them back, we say, oh my god, I completely forgot about that weird so much that I had. Or, you know, I forgot, I ran into that person that day. We had that conversation. IT brings our lives back to us in a very visceral way.

And the college students, when we asked them to do this, things like, oh my god, what you know, what do we have to do right about your day? You know, what could be more boring than that? And when we say, hey, you think you'll be excited to read this later, they say, no, it's a boring day and yet when you go back to your boring day, it's really, really interesting.

And you give, it's completely free. You give yourself this treat of rediscovering your past. And you can see that, you know, when you find something that you made as a kid and you see what your handwriting was like, why is that so interesting and so compelling to us? Because we have forgot. And then the physical evidence brings us back to who we were then. And that's a really lovely feeling if we can get at IT.

Yeah, such as such a great thing I was when I read that in your book, I was thinking about an elementary school teacher. I may have had a couple of them who, at the start of the school year, had all of us students write ourselves a note that they would then either mail to us at the end of the year on a postcard, or that we would get to open up. And it's funny how even today, I still think about that. And just how fun IT was as a kid.

I want a teacher do that. And I found on, my mother kept one and IT had um I think he was from I want to say seventh great IT was at a time when preferences start to be important to our sense of ourselves you know our clothing and our bands and stuff like that. So IT head, you know who's your favorite band? What's your favorite outfit that you wear? All this kind of stuff.

And going back at the first off, you're horrified. And who you are and what you that was cool. And yet also, I had forgotten almost all of that and and bringing IT back, oh my god, that ridiculous.

One of the things was a pair of White pants. But I thought, you know, when I was twelve, just super cool. And obviously they were not super cool.

And I had forgotten all about IT. And they want to came back. I could be like, retroactively embarrassed, which is a weird feeling. You know, you get all these fun, interesting feelings when we do these sorts of things and help ourselves go back in time and bring IT .

into the present. Yeah, I really like what your teacher did because .

they really must have known that. So there's just messing.

Rituals and self regulation, what's the connection? What does this even mean when .

people engage in extreme acts of self control? Very often you see ritual associated with you. So one of the cases that comes up a lot is in religious rituals where you have, you know, people need to pray for a very extended period of time, or remain in a certain position for a very long period time as part of their faith, in order to honor something that's very important to them.

The fact that is embedded in faith and in ritual, that link seems to be there very, very commonly across cultures, across religions and across time. These rituals seem to help us get the resources to engage in self control that could be really, really hard otherwise to enact, because it's very easy to get distracted and start eating the thing that you wanted to eat. For me, i'm an irish catholic.

So one of the things that comes to mind is, and many religions have this in one form or another for us, it's land. Will you give something up for a period of time and then come back to IT later? And that's very, very if anybody tried to die, as I am, it's very, very hard to do. But sometimes when it's in the service of something larger, like your religious faith, or you know, your family is doing IT. And so you want to honor your families customs IT can help you get to the goal in a way that you maybe you could get there anyway out IT.

But the rituals play a role often in helping us get to that goal that we had, and in fact, are not my research, but other research shows that when we give things up for a while and come back to them, the happiness that we get from having giving IT up for a while far out with any pleasure we would have had by consuming at the whole time. But if you've ever given up coffee for a week, a coffee every day, you know, and sometimes they just fade into the background, you're just drinking coffee. But if you give IT up for a week, that coffee on that day is the greatest coffee.

exactly. And so in in an odd religion reminds us to give things up for a period of time so that we can come back to them. But we don't necessarily need religion to that. We can also, of course.

just decide to do IT ourselves. You talk a little IT about this earlier when you were talking about the show this is us, but we've been talking about ritters for ourselves. What about in relationship with others um some of that you've even already talked about, which is couples you know the sense of a shared reality through shared rituals and how important that is.

IT is adorable to ask couples if they have any little. We usually don't use the word rituals, but we say you have any any special thing that you do, that you unique to the two of you that you make sure to do every day or every week or every month.

And usually about IT varies from survey to survey but you know two thirds to three quarters of couple say, you know, we do have a little thing and the things couples do that just so one couple said, um we always kiss in trees and they said, I don't know when I started but it's been twenty years and now we have to kiss in trees and and another couple said, before we eat we link our silver ear together you know, these little that, I mean, what's more boring than a fork fork don't mean and anything but they created this lovely little, very radioing right? Like they don't. A lot of us click glasses that's common.

That's a toaster or whatever. They did their own little version of that, which is clinking folks in order to enjoy their meal a little bit more. And these little tiny rituals, we can see in our research actually can signal something really, really important, which is a sense of commitment.

So when you're in a relationship, you can do things to show your committed, like moving together, or put rings on each other's fingers. Things like that are sign, at least together, whatever you might be, but you don't really know day to day if the person's is committed to you. It's hard to show IT day to day.

And we see in the research that these little actions like clicking the software together, actually served to couples as a sign of commitment, because we've been doing this together for years only. We do this with each other, and we're gonna keep doing this for years to come. And i'd likely idea that we use these little, tiny actions to get at this much, much larger goal on our relationships.

You know, people listening my thing to themselves. I don't have a ritual, and I, you know, part of a couple.

should they be worried? Now we do to see that couples that report having rituals are happier than couples that report not having rituals. But we don't know the cause of direction of that.

So IT may be that if you already didn't like the relationship you're in, why bother developing rituals? Uh, so i'm not sure that adding one now will necessarily solve the problem, but certainly correlationship IT is actually a pretty good predict of relationship satisfaction. And we even see in some of the research, we have both members of a couple, and we can ask them independently.

They can hear what the other person saying. We can say, do you have a special thing that you do, you know, together, and make sure you do IT every so often and very often people agree in in other words, they both say, yes, we do. Or both people say, no, we don't.

But there is a small percent of couples where one person has, yes, we do. And the other person says, no, we don't. But the first persons like, oh my god, you know, I bring coffee to her every single morning and it's such a wonderful moment in our relationship and that means that we love each other. And you ask the wife, he says, not only we have to, those couples are actually, no, they are luckily, they're not sadder, but they're no happier than couples who agree they don't have relationship ritual at all. So there is something about you have to be sharing in the activity both of you seeing IT as meaningful in order for us to see these benefits .

yeah make sense, right? And hopeful you ve created IT together.

That's right. And you know one way you know that you have a ritual, it's hard, it's painful to get there. But if you ever end the relationship, if you were to ever find out that your x was reusing your ritual with a new person, I mean, our aces are allowed to date other people.

They're allowed to marry other people. They are allowed to have children with other people. We might not like IT, but they're allow to.

But they are not allowed to reuse the silver wear clinking with a new person. I mean, people are really, really upset when that happens. Or we use their special nick day.

You know, like I thought, I wish wooer bear calling this new person. So, again, actually the power of them, right? Clinking forks means and nothing in the great scheme of things. But if it's our thing, if you disappeared by we're using IT with someone else, I really am deeply hurt that you would do that and threaten our whole sense of what I was.

We were we've been talking about relationships with others. And one of those places where we have those kinds of relationships are work. And so there's a connection that you write about between rituals and finding meaning at work. What are those kinds of actuals? How can we cultivate them?

This is, you know, if you do surveys of of, especially millennial, but really any group of people, and you say, you know, what are the attributes of work that are important to obviously people to hate, you know that i'd like to have a good salary, of course.

Know there's some very practical things that we want and work work flexibility in terms of my hours, but something that pops up really high in the list is i'd like to do work that's meaningful and meaning is a very slippery construct. But you know, when someone is meaningful to you or not, you can feel IT if I have, you list all the things you do during your day. You can tell me, you know what? That one had meaning in IT, and that one did not time with my daughter had meaning in IT time loading the dishwasher did not have mean in IT.

We know inside of ourselves what has meaning, but how do you get meaning at work? On the one hand, work is you go to a job and you do a task, and then you go home. You can see IT as a complete like automaton robot where you're not thinking anything or feeling anything, or people can invest that same work with meaning like, yes, i'm just typing on a keyboard, but it's in the service of something.

It's in the service of my team or the service of my own personal growth. So there's ways to get meaning out of our work if we kind of can reframe a little bit. But it's really, really hard because work can be really, really boring.

One of the things that we see is if we ask people at work, um you know are you on a team and most people work on a team is one kind or another and we say, just like we ask couples, we ask teams, do you have anything you do that's kind of specific to you that you make sure to do every day or every week or every month and many people say no but most teams, members of teams say, yeah we have a little something and these aren't rituals like um you know stopping and clapping and shouting at each other. They're very subtle rituals. So one of the ones that um I think is very telling, someone told us that their team at work, uh did a ritual where each person was responsible for lunch one day of the week.

And so what they are doing with that is everyone is going to eat lunch every day. That's not interesting. But each day, one person is taking care of the entire team and then the next day, a different person is taking care of the entire team.

And they're been doing this for years. So if you think about their ritual, they really make sure to do IT every single day. It's a little bit like our marriages, right? We've been doing this for a long time. We're doing IT today and we're going to keep doing this. IT means something different than just eating lunch. And we see the teams who have these sorts of practices, these rituals will say not only is that thing meaningful itself, but IT seems to translate over a little bit into the meaning that they find in their work in general.

We see this if you ever do any work with, and you write about this outdoor leaders, you can really get that sense there. They seem to almost be the masters of IT. You know, I think they're so much we can learn from them. Talk a little bit about what they do and how they do IT.

You know, it's interesting that when I talk about workplace for rituals, people think about corporate retreats, and which is the worst thing in the world. I mean, most people do not like to do that. I would say you get a lot of eyes roles and like the steroid pick, worst thing is the trust fall because it's just so easy.

And so you know and so on the one hand, absolutely I totally get IT. On the other hand, um again, compared to what so compare to never getting together or never engaging in something where we actually do have to trust each other in one way or another. So it's not like these rituals are necessarily you know everybody loves doing them at every moment or that they're magically you know you do a trust fall and now the team is fifty percent more effective.

You obviously, that's not how these things work, but IT is the case. And we do see IT in interviews that people people even say we did the trust flow. IT was super cheesy.

But you know what? IT was a thing where I actually had to just trust my team and fall back and trust that they would catch me. And so even the things sometimes that we think are G, C.

Or silly, compared to doing nothing at all of that nature, those rituals can still change the way we feel about our teams. And we have one thing is very funny. So first thing that comes along for people's corporate retreats.

The second thing that comes to mind, they'll say, oh my god, we had this manager. And over the weekend they would watch like a ted talk or here a podcast or something, and come in on monday and be now we're going to do everything like this. And rituals was one of them.

I I heard I heard this ted talk. And now here's the report we need to do to get, you know, together as a team and the employees, you know huge iro, they have to do IT because is the manager a huge I role. But what's funny from my perspective is they're doing the arrow in with each other and they are bonding by hating the manager.

And so oddly, no, it's not with the manager intended. If you are looking for bonding among employees, throwing stuff like this at them actually can make them feel more connected to each other like literally a set of solidarity. It's just that it's comes at your .

expense when we think about work, something that you brought up as well as you know, when the day is done, you could not want to leave behind. And IT sounds like rituals conserve us there as well. I think a lot of us started to think really hard about that with COVID when we were working from home. But whether you're working from home or your commuting somewhere, how can you really put rituals to work for yourself to completely leave behind .

in this research we wanted to see? So in the same way we look at rich als, you know, in the morning to get you ready to leave the house and get to work, and we look at rituals while you're performing at work, you know, before a big meeting, shooting yourself in the bathroom. And we look at team rituals at work as well.

That can change the mean of your work. It's almost like ritual scaffold our entire day at work because we also use them to try to leave work behind. And leaving work behind for some people is very easy to do and rather people, it's incredibly chAllenging.

And of course, what we want to do is talk to people for him, it's incredibly chAllenging and see what they try to do to leave work behind. In one of those studies that we did, we interviewed emergency room nurses, which is I don't have the official rankings, but I can imagine there are many jobs that are more stressful and emotionally draining. In being an emergency room nurse, the shifts aren't incredibly large, incredibly unpredictable.

People are obviously at the, at their worst in every possible way. And somehow, when the clock hits eight o'clock, you're supposed to just snap your fingers, turn IT off, go home and be your home self again. That is really, really hard to do.

It's hard to do for many, many people. It's really, really hard to do when your job is so taxing and so emotionally and growing. So what do these nurses do? What we asked them, what do you do when you get home? Not all of them do rituals, but lots of them tell us something that sounds a little bit like original.

One person um that had an interesting ritual was I was longer than this. But part of the ritual was they would get in the shower and they would feel as though they were washing the hospital of themselves, and they would envision the hospital going down the drain. Work was going down the drain.

And once all the work had gone down the drain, they could be back to their another product actually had something very similar, but this guy brought a beer and to the shower as part of as well, which I think is more I can adore that or not. But now you see see people doing different things that match their personality. But I think it's really, really interesting to think about how do you separate yourself from home and work self.

There's lots of ways to do IT. But again, one of the things people seem to turn to is ritual. And as you said, IT becomes particularly chAllenging when you are working from home, or at least if you work at a job, you've got a commute to maybe get a little bit of unwinding in between.

When you're at home, you've got a six second commute years ago from your bedroom in the whatever right next to you. And then you gotta start work. And we saw people and dance cover a, you know, when people, all everyone had to work from home, in a sense, many people had to work from home.

We saw people, they lost their rituals they used to do to separate work from homes. They came up with the new ones. And my favor one was a guy who used the bike to work.

And so what he started doing was he was in his bedroom. He would put on his biking gear. He would hop on his bike and bike down his hallway about, you know, six ten feet.

Get off the bike, take the bike closed off, put his work closed on, do his work day vent at the end of the day, bike closed back on on the bike, six feet off the bike, put the regular clothes on back to work on the one end. You can say that is borderline completely crazy. On the other hand, I compared to what you know, I mean, how also we supposed to divide work from home when they're so close together. Many, many people said, i'm going to do something a little bit ritualistic to see if I can help me.

There are two questions I always ask is part of an interview. And the first one has to do with the fact that the theme of the podcasting is curiosity. What are the most curious about today?

I have been um incredibly interested in the ritual surrounding being a professor. So I gave I gave a talk last night um uh to to a that S A good brag. It's really but to a fairly large crowd.

And one of the things that happens when you give a talk like that is for the period of time that you are in the front of the room, you can make people do whatever you want. So I have people stand up, do rituals, clap, stop, shouts, whatever. But if as soon as the a lot of time is over, you know what? If IT ends at six thirty, let's say, I can't do IT anymore immediately i've lost everything.

And I love this idea that we grant things to people for a period of time and then pull them back as soon as that period of time is over. And we're pretty good. Like even within the doll, as we talked about, you know, he's allowed to do is preserve thing when he's serving.

But if he's doing IT in front of us in line at a supermarket, we're like come on and get we have get out the way. So when and how do we allow people to space to engage in rituals and who gets to decide? I've I thought about IT a bit, but we never really did any research join IT that's been really, really on my mind.

That's really, really interesting. The other thing is, you know, there's so much in your book and we only have so much time together, so I can't ask everything I would love to ask anything I haven't asked though that you want to speak to or anything you want to leave the listeners with that we haven't been able to talk about.

I think um you know one very, very fair reaction to hearing about the possible benefits of rituals is, you know who has the time you know so if I said, you know it's really good for your well being is to meditate six hours a day, it's just i'm sure it's true. It's just it's not helpful. You know, I I I wish I could, but I can't get yourself to do.

And so I think the idea of what now i'm to add five hours of rituals to my day. You I know time for that. So one of the things that I have found very valuable in my own life is before even thinking about adding anything, is just actually to take an inventory of what i'm already doing.

And if you've been listening, you can you probably been thinking, oh, you know what, my space and I do something like that or you actually, my family does do this at the holidays. Think more about those. If you don't think you have any rituals, ask your spouse, ask your kids, ask your coworkers, they'll tell you you have plenty.

And then really think about why those are so meaningful. Why do you do them and what do they mean to you? And so when you're clinking your silver, where the way you do you every night with your spouse, you get a little extra meaning in IT because you're kind of owning the fact that this is what we do and this is an expression of us.

So is the first step really just seeing where the R. D. Had play in your life and recognizing them for me when I recognized that, almost laugh at myself in a good way. Oh my god, i'm doing my thing again. But that's a really nice feeling actually of identity and who I am in the world yeah and .

the impact you're having, right like to see your little signature is your hallmark.

That's right.

yeah. Like I can't. Thank you enough. Has been such a pleasure to speak with you.

I am really grateful. Thank you.

Curious minds at work is made possible through a partnership with the innovator circle, an executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. A special thank you to producer an editor rock a belly for leaving the amazing behind the scenes team that makes IT all happen. Each episode we give a shout out to something, this feeding our curiosity.

This week, it's a shot motors novel, my friends. It's a story of friendship and the crucial role they play when you're far from home and family. It's also a story of politics and literature and how the two intersect with the protected onest never what a beautiful book.