Thoughts for the Day:
Did you know that we have an average of up to 50,000 thoughts per day?
As crazy as that number sounds, here’s an even more amazing stat – up to 95% of those thoughts are the SAME thing repeated over and over every day { according to the National Science Foundation }.
That’s a lot of time repeating ourselves with very little space for thinking new thoughts.
So if we think the same things from the time we get up to when we get back into bed at night, are we able to really grow where we are in our lives and in our businesses? How much growth can really happen when we are on rinse and repeat every day?
Imagine what you could do to build your business if you were able to move out of your daily programs and give yourself the space to grow.
Why a Pattern Interrupt may be the thing that you need
Routines and habits are great for us to get our work done and to keep the momentum of our business moving forward. We know exactly what to do and when.
But what happens during those moments when your patterns and habits aren’t helping you to move forward but keep you in a standstill?
When you decide to make a change in your business, you have two choices:
I’ve personally experienced this shift when I made the choice to disrupt my own way of thinking when COVID hit my business. Instead of stew in worry, I started to paint.
Think of your patterns like this – almost everything that you do in your life is something that you developed from habit, from where you go to walk your dog to how you make coffee in the morning. There was a good reason why you started doing these steps in this specific pattern but eventually, you stopped asking yourself why and you just did it.
A pattern is your learned response to a stimulus. That stimulus can be anything from a person, a smell, taste or even a noise. No matter what the stimulus is, your brain and body react the same way; like the way you might hit the snooze button three times when your alarm goes off in the morning.
We’ve all been raised with a series of patterns.
As kids, we had bedtime routines and actions that we did every day at school. As adults, we’ve shifted our desire for patterns into the way that you drive the same route to work every day or go down the same aisles at the same grocery store every week.
Your brain loves it when you can develop a pattern like this. It makes you feel safe and like there’s order to your world.
Patterns aren’t only in your physical world. Your patterns can also include your beliefs, thoughts, and feelings. And while you can’t always control the stimulus around yourself, you can control the way you respond.
And since your brain is programmed to feel safe in these patterns that you created, this is one of the main reasons why it feels so hard to make a change.
Your brain wants to feel the comfort of the patterns and any resistance can cause you to react physically – like when you have the feeling of butterflies in your stomach.
So what happens when you tap into your creativity and create a Pattern Interrupt?
The first step to move out of autopilot is to reflect on your day and think about the actions that you do every day. Notice the patterns of actions that you’re doing without even realizing why or how you’re getting them done.
That moment of consciousness about the actions you’re doing will be a huge step forward in learning how to disrupt your patterns.
It’s like those moments when you’re trying to be healthier – your usual pattern after a long day is to head straight for the couch with the remote in your hand and a bag of chips but instead you break the pattern, put on your sneakers and go for a walk instead.
A Pattern Interrupt is basically a way to change a thought, behavior or a situation. It involves breaking your habitual pattern by doing something to shake it up out of its usual routine.
When a pattern is interrupted, you’re left without a next step in your behavior and it opens up the right – creative side of your brain. You move the thoughts from ‘decision-waiting mode’ and push you into ‘what now’ mode.
And when you spend time in creative energy, your brain says to you, “OK, what do you want me to do now?”
I’m sure you’ve experienced those moments when inspirational ideas have popped into your head during the shower or when you’re in the car on a long drive.
Those ah-ha moments are not something that we can force and they tend to happen when we release our need to control our environment and we just let things flow on their own.
This is the power of the Pattern Interrupt
How can you use creativity to learn to interrupt your own patterns to make a change in your business?
Let’s use an example of you spending too much time scrolling on Facebook instead of writing your weekly blog posts.
- First, you’ll choose the behavior you’d like to change { stop wasting time on Facebook } by incorporating more creative activities to disrupt it. It should be a behavior or habit that you do automatically, without even thinking.
- Next, spend some time being aware of how this pattern occurs. Is your phone next to your laptop making it easy to hit the Facebook app and start scrolling aimlessly?
- Once you see HOW you’re doing this habit, it’s time to create a pattern interrupt that will take your focus off the habit.
Obviously moving your phone away from your computer will help but will that stop you from logging into Facebook on your laptop? You want to make sure that your pattern interrupt has nothing to do with the behavior and will grab your attention AWAY from the habit.
So if my goal is to stop logging into Facebook and do something creative like writing my blog posts, I could schedule time to write away from my usual workspace. I could go to a coffee shop, leave my phone in the car and then give myself a two hour block { using a timer in your laptop } to just write.
- That suggestion to go to a coffee shop sounds great but what happens when you feel that itch to check Facebook when you should be writing?
It doesn’t mean that you can’t make this pattern interrupt change so don’t immediately disregard yourself as someone who can’t do this.
Notice what’s happening when these behaviors come back to you.
Remember, you’ve trained your brain to do these habits and when you try to deviate from your usual behaviors, your body will try to move you back into its comfort box. { come on, just one look, isn’t it my best friend’s birthday today? Shouldn’t I at least login and send her a message with a birthday gif? }
- Continue to push through by observing what happens in your brain and body. The more you interrupt your pattern, the less you’ll feel the need to want to choose Facebook over writing your blog posts.
Writing your posts in the coffee shop will become your new habit and most likely, you’ll begin to experience joy when you start packing up your things to head out to do your writing. You’ll start to replace that feeling of wanting to scroll on Facebook with what you’ll be doing when you spend time in your creative energy at the coffee shop.
You’ll disrupt that pattern and use creativity instead of wasting your time. And you’ll be writing for the pure sake of enjoying the writing.
Managing creativity in your business
When you’re able to recognize the pattern in your thoughts and feelings that’s not working and stops you with all its excuses, you’ll be able to choose how to change your thoughts to get you where you want to go.
It is extremely important to trust your feelings surrounding your choices when you’re paying attention to your gut instinct. Don’t always look towards the familiar but remain open to new ideas and to the creative energy in your life.
And the biggest thing you’ll need to accept with this process is that even though you’ll feel discomfort like fear, worry and anxiety, you’ll come out into a better place afterwards. When you start moving through the familiar into thinking differently, then you’re really ready to disrupt these behavioral patterns within your brain’s pathways.
You’ve likely heard the expression that “life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you react to it.”
And if we truly believe that we have control over how we react to something, then it opens us up to more opportunities because you know that you have a choice about how to respond to see real growth in your business.
Want to see how this works?
If you want to dig deeper into learning more about how a pattern interrupt can help you build your business, I’d love to see you order a copy of
“I Just Did a Thing … A Creative Approach to PIVOTing and Designing Revolutionary Changes in Life and Business”
In this book, you’ll learn how to develop your own process of taking the usual things that you ‘think you’re supposed to do’ to build your business and find a different way to take action that’s true to you. With a few simple steps, you can develop your own unique way of working the way you want.
This book is for you when you’re ready to push through the fear of change because you know it’s greater than staying in the feeling of discomfort by not doing anything.
This book is for you when you’re ready to make a shift in your business and make that big PIVOT that will change your life in a different direction.