Rituals of Renewal

Morning, weekly, and quarterly rituals that sustain focus and emotional regulation for high-stakes roles.

Author

Regina Gerbeaux
January 11, 2026 • Reading Time: 13 minutes

In high school, I was in JROTC, which is basically Army bootcamp for teens.

I was a horrible cadet.

As a fourteen year old, I was defiant and didn't respect authority. There was a lot of, "You act like my superior but you're just a sophomore in high school; stop power tripping.” It won me a lot of friends (sarcasm - it actually didn’t).

Being this defiant kid, I hated being on someone else's schedule and agenda.

But one thing that stuck with me was seeing the power of predictable routine.

Every year, there was a special week of training we would do at Camp Parks, an Army base located in Dublin, CA.

We woke up every morning and stood at attention for count off. We got in the same uniform every day. We had inspections of our closets to make sure our uniforms were hung in perfect manner with hangers spaced exactly two inches apart (we used our finger width to measure). We did PT at ungodly hours. Makeup was strictly forbidden. We ate at the same mess halls, then stood at parade rest in formation waiting for everyone else to finish. Leaders always ate last. We rinsed, recycled, and repeated.

I hated the routine at the time. But I saw the benefits of having something so intentionally designed.

Years later, when I was in charge of my own life, I picked up almost the exact same routine. But this time, it was different. I didn't resent it. I looked forward to it.

I woke up at 4:30am, meditating with my coffee. I worked out at the gym, showered, and ate breakfast. I got started with my workday by 8am. I loved having two hours of focus time in the morning, refusing all meetings before 10am. I loved putting away my phone after 5pm to be present with my family.

The whole point of rituals is there's no one-size-fits-all approach. You just have to be intentional about creating a life you love, and getting people around you to support it (whether it's a Chief of Staff or EA that protects your time, a partner who lovingly reminds you to put your phone away while you're spending time with them, or forced retreats to detox effectively).

Most leaders I work with have a ritual. It's just unintentional.

Stop me if this sounds familiar to you:

  1. Wake up to an alarm. Shit, it's so early! You're tired. You didn't go to bed early enough last night because you were busy putting out fires on Slack or in the codebase until 1am.

  2. Immediately open your email and Slack messages while still laying in bed. Your cortisol is rising already. Everything feels urgent and important. How is it possible your day started five minutes ago and you already feel overwhelmed?

  3. You can't be bothered to deal with this now. Open TikTok and start scrolling because your brain is overloaded. You need a distraction.

  4. Start texting your friends on Messages as you brush your teeth and pee.

  5. No time to do anything else - you have to get to the office for your 8am meeting. You'll be in back-to-back meetings all day long. Skip breakfast. Skipping breakfast is fine anyway, right? It basically means you're fasting.

  6. Stuff your face with lunch in between meetings. You wish you could talk with your team, but you don't have time. You know you should invest in talking to them at some point, but today is not the day. Tomorrow doesn't look great either.

  7. Meetings are done. Your brain is fried. You wanted to go to the gym, but you're exhausted and two urgent things showed up on your calendar, so you'll skip the gym today. Again. For the third time this week.

  8. You told your partner you'd pick up dinner on the way home and sit with them for a meal, but you're really "slammed at work." Would they mind if you ate separately? You might come home an hour later than you thought.

  9. Stagger home. Half-absentmindedly give your partner a hug and kiss before scrolling Slack for the thousandth time.

  10. Sit at your laptop until your partner has long been asleep to fix the fires.

  11. Shower (maybe), brush teeth (maybe), and fall asleep.

This is a ritual. It's just a terrible one.

And it's destroying you.

The difference between a ritual that sustains you and one that drains you isn't about discipline or willpower. With rituals, intentionality is your friend.

Rituals are just habits and routines. But the leaders who thrive in high-stakes roles don't let their rituals get thrust upon them. They design them deliberately.

Here's how to do this on your own.

The Playbook on Building Rituals That Actually Stick

Start With an Energy Audit

Before you build any rituals, you need to understand what actually gives you energy versus what drains it.

Diana Chapman from the Conscious Leadership Group teaches this exercise: Print out the last two weeks of your calendar. Get two different colored highlighters. Go through every activity and mark it green if it gave you energy, red if it drained you.

Your goal should be to spend 75-80% of your time doing things that energize you. If you're not there, your rituals need to shift what's on your calendar.

💡 This audit reveals the truth: You can't ritual your way out of a fundamentally draining life. If 90% of your work depletes you, no morning routine will save you. You need to delegate, eliminate, or redesign the work itself.

The Non-Negotiables

Some rituals I always suggest to leaders, regardless of their personal preferences:

Daily rituals:

  • Meditation. Even five minutes. Consistency beats intensity. As James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, five minutes every day is infinitely better than an hour once a month.

  • Exercise. Move your body. Whatever form that takes for you.

  • Mindful eating. At least one meal where you're actually present.

Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about this beautifully in The Miracle of Mindfulness. He said there are two ways to wash the dishes: the first is to wash them in order to have clean dishes, and the second is to wash the dishes to wash the dishes.

The same applies to eating. When you eat, eat. Don't scroll. Don't answer emails. Don't have your phone on the table. Just eat.

Weekly rituals:

  • Interact with nature. At least once a week, touch water, grass, dirt. Get outside.

  • No-phone time. At meals. Before and after work hours. Create boundaries.

Quarterly rituals:

  • Electronic detox. At least one week with no devices.

  • Social media detox. At least one month off all platforms.

  • Restoration week. One full week per quarter of no work. Complete rest.

These aren't suggestions. They make up the baseline for cognitive function and emotional regulation in high-stakes roles. Skip doing these at your peril.

The Secret: Habit Stacking

Here's the problem most leaders face: they try to build too many new rituals at once, and they all fall apart.

The solution is habit stacking, a concept James Clear popularized in Atomic Habits (you can tell I really love this book.) You take an existing habit and stack a new one on top of it.

For me, it looked like this:

Wake up, then get changed, then brush my teeth, then make coffee, then work out, then shower, then eat breakfast, then do deep work, then check my phone, then start meetings.

But it started with the simplest thing to enforce: the workout. I didn't want to miss any gym time, so that became the anchor. Everything else stacked around it.

Start with one ritual that's already working (or that you're committed to), then build around it.

If you already meditate in the morning, stack journaling right after. If you already have coffee, stack reading for 10 minutes while you drink it. If you already go for walks, stack a no-phone rule during those walks.

Small, sequential additions. Not a complete life overhaul on January 1st that collapses by January 15th.

When Rituals Fail

Most rituals fail because they're overscheduled or unrealistic.

You can't go from scrolling TikTok until 2am to waking up at 4:30am for a two-hour morning routine. You are punishing yourself with this kind of behavior.

Start small. Start realistic. Start with what you can actually sustain.

👉 If you keep failing at a ritual, ask yourself:

• Is this actually giving me energy, or am I doing it because someone else said I should?

• Is the timing realistic for my actual life?

• Have I designed my environment to support this, or am I relying on willpower alone?

Rituals work when they're designed around your reality, not someone else's ideal.

Design Your Support System

Here's what most leaders miss: rituals don't exist in a vacuum.

You need people around you who protect and reinforce them.

If you have a Chief of Staff or EA, their job includes protecting your ritual time. No meetings before 10am means no meetings before 10am. Not "well, just this one exception."

If you have a partner, they need to understand why you're putting your phone away at dinner. They become your accountability partner, not your critic.

If you're taking a restoration week quarterly, your leadership team needs to know this is non-negotiable. They need systems in place to handle things without you.

Your rituals are only as strong as the systems and people supporting them.

For me personally, I have an incredible duo of EAs I rely on for help with my personal life, work life, and even this newsletter. That allows me the support system to delegate the stuff I don’t love doing, and focusing on what I actually like. For example, I love writing these newsletters, but don’t like doing anything else (marketing, creating materials, posting, and so on).

If you’re looking for a great EA, I use Atlas Assistants for mine and suggest doing the same. You can click on this link for a personal referral, and you’ll get $500 off onboarding fee.

Your Rituals Are Your Strategic Advantage

Think about the leaders you admire most. The ones who seem calm under pressure. Who make better decisions. Who don't burn out every six months.

They're not superhuman. They have rituals.

Bill Gates has his Think Weeks. Marc Randolph had his Tuesday nights. Every high-performer I've worked with has some version of intentional renewal built into their life.

Not because they're virtuous or disciplined. Because they realized something critical: you can't operate at your highest level without regular renewal.

Your brain needs rest. Your body needs movement. Your nervous system needs regulation. These aren't nice-to-haves. They're requirements for sustained high performance.

The leaders who win aren't the ones who grind the hardest. They're the ones who know when to rest.

Where to Start

You don't need to overhaul your entire life this week.

Pick just one ritual to start with.

Maybe it's:

  • Five minutes of meditation when you wake up

  • A 10-minute walk after lunch

  • Putting your phone in another room during dinner

  • Going to bed at the same time every night for a week

Start there. Make it so easy you can't fail.

Then, once that's working, stack something else on top of it.

Don’t look for perfection. Instead, aim for intentionality.

You're already living with rituals. The question is: are they serving you, or destroying you?

If you're waking up exhausted, racing through your day, and collapsing into bed wondering where the time went, your rituals are working against you.

It's time to design better ones.

And if you know a leader who's stuck in the cycle of reactive rituals, forward this to them. They might not realize they have a choice.

Until next time,

📌 Resources mentioned:

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About Regina Gerbeaux

Regina Gerbeaux was the first Chief of Staff to an executive coach who worked with Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs, including Brian Armstrong (Coinbase), Naval Ravikant (AngelList), Sam Altman (OpenAI / Y Combinator), and Alexandr Wang (Scale).

Shortly after her role as Chief of Staff, then COO, she opened her own coaching practice, Coaching Founder, and has worked with outrageously talented operators on teams like Delphi AI, dYdX, Astronomer, Fanatics Live, and many more companies backed by funds like Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz.

Her open-sourced write-ups on Operational Excellence and how to run a scaling company can be found here and her templates can be found here.

She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her partner, daughter, and dog, and can be found frequenting 6:00AM Orangetheory classes or hiking trails nearby.

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