Habits matter. Good or bad, you will default to them when you lack willpower. Or when you’re tired. Or overwhelmed. Or when you’re not thinking. This is why having a morning routine matters so much. It gets you into mental hope for the rest of your day. And, along with other habits; exercise, good sleep and brushing your teeth. Once engrained, they set you up for success. Yep, get that, but what do I actually do?
The answers varies, with each person developing their own morning routine ideas. Not a morning person? Start with some exercise. Your life in constant motion, meditate. Feeling unchallenged? Pick up a few big books. The point isn’t so much the what you do is that it sets you up to face your day. This gives you consistency and strength during hard times as well as a lovely boost on normal to good ones
So What Do You Do, Colleen?
My morning starts with The Miracle Morning program. For those of you who haven’t read the book by Hal Elrod, he has a story to go with it, the why behind the what, but his “miracle” has six elements
- Silence: aka meditation, but that doesn’t fit into the acronym
- Affirmations: His are more involved than the typical
- Visualize: Self-explanatory
- Exercise: Ditto
- Read: Choose something challenging, not a piece of word candy
- Scribe: aka journal, but, again, not acronym friendly
Why this one? Did it speak to me on some deep level? Did my intuition say ‘This once, Colleen, will change your life!’ Nope. I needed something and this sounded doable.
To Tell the Truth
Do I do it every morning? Hell to the no, but most of them. And, trust me, I notice a real difference. In feel it in my energy level. I see it in my output. And when I don’t. This gets me in the right frame of mind to face my day. I get a shine knowing I’ve accomplished something before I’ve even gotten dressed.
Putting On The Writers Cap
And then, still in pjs, I write. Well, on the days when my W2 job doesn’t interfere. If it does, well, then I’m an afternoon writer, but most days, I go from the Miracle to the work. It took me some time to get my brain to wrap around this idea when the story you’ve sold to yourself a vision of a night owl, that I work better in the morning. And, in case you wondered, yep, I write while lying in my bed. It works. Plus, I got the idea from Jackie Kennedy Onassis. It worked for her, sow why not try it, and if a bit of her glamour wore off, I wouldn’t complain. Not sure if the latter even happened, but it does work for me.
What about you? Do you have a morning routine? Want to share? The comments await