Tag: habits

What is your daily routine?

  • Media: Video
  • Language focus: Routines, Verbs

What is your daily routine?

My daily routine is the backbone of my success. I am nauseatingly disciplined and predictable. Even when I’m on vacation, I still need to do some of the same tasks to start the day on the right foot. For example, whether it’s a normal week, or I’m in the woods camping, I must start the day sitting quietly with a hot latte. Even my children have learned not to disturb me during that time.

Making Peace with my Limits

Clearly, somewhere down the road of my life, I have made my peace with the fact that if I don’t eat well, I feel like crap. If I don’t do enough exercise, my jeans get tighter. If I don’t make lists and prioritize, I feel overwhelmed and stressed. And if I don’t get a good night’s sleep, it all goes to hell.

Discipline and Repetition

Undoubtedly, the secret for me is doing the same things, in the same order, every day. It may sound boring, but it works. I don’t even have to think about it. And if I get that evil voice that says “forget the push-ups, just for this morning”, I really try to ignore it. It’s not that I am overly rigid, but in the grand scheme of things, I know what I need to feel good even if that means that while doing it, I feel like I’m dying.

Lesson Notes

For this lesson on daily routines, I found a great animated short that really sparks the good vs the bad habits. So not only can you generate the vocabulary of habits, you might get into a debate about why we need our habits and why it is difficult to maintain the good ones and push the bad ones aside.

You can use the accompanying handout ($1.99 on TPT). It includes key vocabulary and answer key. Or you can just watch the video and discuss with the questions included in this post.

Handout on TPT

Pre discussion

  • What do you do every day?
  • What do you do every week?
  • What do you do every year?
  • What routines make you feel good?
  • What routines make you feel not so good?

The Video: THE CHOICE by Project Better Self

Discussion

  • Make a good and bad list
  • What are some of the choices you make every day that contribute to your health?
  • What happens when you make good choices (mentally, physically)?
  • What are some of your “guilty pleasures”?
  • Is it possible to be too disciplined?
  • Do you agree with everything in the video?
  • If you were to change one thing in the good example, what would it be?

Are you a procrastinator or a planner?

Are you a procrastinator or a planner? That is the question. Personally I am a planner. I get a sense of what needs to be done, break it down into task and plan it out so that I can do it before the deadline. I think that is largely due to the fact that being dyslexic, I need time to review. But that is certainly not true for everyone. In fact, Miles Bess exposes that up to 95% of people consider themselves to be procrastinators. That’s huge! I had no idea.

So let’s talk about this…

Pre discussion

  • Do you wait t’ill the late minute to do things or do you plan ahead?
  • What benefits do you get out of being one or the other?

The Video: PBS  Above the Noise: Can Procrastination Be a Good Thing?

Questions

  • Why do you think so many people procrastinate?
  • What are the pros and cons of procrastination?
  • What famous people or documents were made last minute?
  • Can you explain ‘task-driven’ and ‘deadline driven’
  • What are some of your procrastination ‘go-to’s’ (e.g. video games, eating, shopping, etc.)
  • What advice would you give the procrastinator?
  • What advice would you give the planner?

Hope you have fun with this lesson…

 

What do you do differently in your culture?

I grew up in multicultural Canada. Just in my small group of friends there was me (franco-british), an Indian girl, a Lebanese girl, an Israeli girl, and a German girl. We loved to compare ourselves. We could spend all evening just playing “how do you say…in your language,” we would compare breakfast rituals, religions, fatherly roles, mothers, everything.

Back then I took the wealth of this environment for granted, but now I see how it has shaped me into an open, curious and culturally inclusive person. It takes a lot for me to make negative cultural generalizations about any one person, yet I do allow myself to notice certain patterns and rituals that can  define us more than we know. Even though that may seem contradictory, in my head it makes sense and it is beautiful.

Derek Sivers presents a very short TED talk on this very topic. But in areas that we probably never ponder. Like how home addresses are organized, or how the world map is looked at. It seems a good launching pad to think about some of the aspects cultures may differ and take a look at the world for the opposite perspective.

Pre discussion

  • Tell us something about your culture that we probably don’t know.
  • What habits or rituals surprised you about other cultures?

The Video: Weird, or just different

  • What bubbles up in your mind after watching this talk?
  • Why do you think Sivers in making this point?
  • Make a list of what is the same across cultures and what is different.
  • What do you think would happen if we were more exposed to cultural differences?

Please share the results of your discussion.

 

 

 

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