THE MIRACLE MORNING
Creating a morning ritual
"If you want a fulfilling and happy life, your morning routine is the place to start." – Hal Elrod.
Many successful people - multi-millionaires, top managers, and TV stars - are early birds, and probably get more done before you have even brewed your first coffee. But it's not just about waking up early. The importance of creating a morning ritual consists of six simple activities that you can utilize to start creating the life you've always wanted. Find out which techniques you can employ to change your way of thinking and your daily habits in order to achieve your dreams and goals.
Rear-view Mirror Syndrome (RMS)
Rear view mirror syndrome and isolating incidences prevent people from reaching their full potential. Have you ever considered that the way you think about your life might be the very thing that is preventing you from fulfilling your potential? The majority of us tend to make decisions based on our past and in doing so, suffer from something known as rear view mirror syndrome, RMS. If you're an RMS sufferer, you believe that who you used to be is who you are now, and your choices and decisions are informed by the limitations of your past experience. So, when you come across new opportunities, you often turn them down on the grounds that you've never experienced them before. Aside from RMS, another reason we don't reach our potential lies in our habit of isolating incidents. This means we treat events in our life as though they're disconnected from everything else, which is contrary to reality. For example, perhaps you think it's perfectly fine to skip your workout today, since you can always do it tomorrow. But rather than your decision just affecting this moment in time, you're actually affecting the person you're becoming.
"How you do anything is how you do everything." - T. Harv Eker.
So, if you look at incidents in isolation, you end up being more lenient on yourself and the events you think of as mere exceptions will become the norm. As a result, your ability to achieve your dreams is stunted and you succeed only to the level which your excuses allow you. If you want to create life on your own terms, you need to change the way you think about it. Dwelling on the past and making excuses will only hinder your success.
Wake up with a purpose
To start the day well, stop hitting the snooze button and change how you think about sleep. So maybe you're convinced that you need to change your life, but where do you start?
Well, first, a quick question. Did you hit the snooze button this morning?
Many of us would be guilty of this. So, what's the problem? Well, hitting the snooze button keeps us from waking with a sense of purpose. Each time you reach for that button, you are subconsciously saying to yourself that you don't want to rise to your life, your experiences, and the day ahead. When you resist waking up, you reduce your chances of enjoying a satisfying day. Conversely, if you wake up every morning with a purpose in mind, you'll be on your way to crafting a happy life. Take a look at Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, and even Aristotle. All of these famous people have one thing in common: Getting up early.
If you find yourself always sluggish in the morning, try changing the way you think about sleep. Consider this. Have you ever woken up completely drained on a special day? Probably not. If it's your birthday, wedding day or Christmas morning, then no matter if you got only a few short hours of sleep, you likely woke up full of energy and anticipation for the day ahead. This is because the beliefs we hold about our sleep play a crucial role in how we feel when we wake up. When you go to sleep thinking, this is way too little sleep, I will feel exhausted tomorrow, you're spoiling your morning before you've even dozed off.
Raise your wake-up motivation level
Change your morning routine to increase your wake-up motivation level. So how do you do this? One significant leap you can make is to change your morning routine by raising your wake up motivation level. This level can be described on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 means that you're eager to rise and greet the day ahead, and 1 means you would rather just roll back into bed. Fortunately, employing just a few basic techniques can make you more alert and give you more of a spark during your morning routine.
First, before heading to bed, you should affirm to yourself that you'll rise the next morning feeling refreshed. If you can get yourself to look forward to the next day somehow, waking up will be a lot less of a chore for you.
Next, place your alarm clock on the other side of the room to your bed. This of course means that you'll actually need to get up out of bed when it rings in the morning in order to turn it off. Once you're out of bed and have switched off your alarm, head to the bathroom and brush your teeth. Doing this will give you a feeling of freshness and help you feel more awake first thing.
After this, go to the kitchen for a glass of water and drink it as fast as you can comfortably manage. This allows you to rehydrate after a night of losing water through breathing. It's important to note that dehydration can actually make you feel extremely tired. By completing these simple steps, you'll wake up feeling brighter and prepared for the core practice of the miracle morning routine.
Create your ideal life
Use affirmation and visualization in the morning to start creating your ideal life. How do we go from a mediocre life to a life that we love and that truly fulfils us? One way is to look at our self-talk. Our brains are subconsciously programmed by the way we talk to ourselves, but it's possible to alter this by using positive affirmations. All of us have constant streams of thoughts in our head, which are grounded in our previous experiences, and they can work for or against us, depending on how we use them. To turn some of your thoughts into positive affirmations, you can follow these steps.
Articulate and note down how you want your life to look in every area.
Clarify your motives by asking yourself why you want what you want and ask yourself what you're committed to doing to get your life there, or even just to get to the next level.
After you have created your affirmation, be sure to read it out loud to yourself at least once a day.
Another important tool to have at your disposal to achieve success is visualization or mental rehearsal. You too can employ this technique to visualize your ideal life, your dreams, and goals. For example, if you want to write a book, visualize yourself feeling inspired and joyfully writing page after page at your desk. Your affirmations can help you visualize the answers when you ask yourself questions such as, what do I want? Why do I want it? And what am I committed to doing in order to get there? Affirmation and visualization are powerful tools.
The importance of morning exercise
Morning exercise will keep your body healthy and spur your success. We often find that we are far too busy to exercise. It seems as though our lives are so packed with activities that we often feel totally depleted in the evenings. So why not try starting the day with some exercise to get it done first thing?
Exercise is vitally important to keeping our bodies healthy, so it's a smart idea to make room for it in our lives. Too few of us manage to exercise during the day even though we're all aware of the benefits, like a reduced risk of disease and just feeling good because you're in shape. The thing is, we also know that our days will be busy. Last minute appointments get scheduled and important tasks can crop up, so, often, we just collapse on the couch at the end of the day, too exhausted to go for a run or a workout. Even though we know exercise is important we frequently push it to the side yet making time for it as part of our morning can really aid our success.
Make time to read and write
Read and write in the morning to focus on personal growth. Once you've exercised, it's time to focus on your personal growth as the next stage of your miracle morning. Reading and writing are two significant activities that can help you reflect on your successes and move toward what you want out of life. We can all find a little time to read and reading books on personal development in the morning is one quick means of gaining insight from others who have experienced success. There are books on all kinds of goals, such as increasing your earnings, improving your relationships, or building a business. A good reading target to aim for is a minimum of 10 pages per day.
This means around 10 to 20 minutes of reading per day, depending on how quickly you read. Surprisingly, this amounts to approximately 3,650 pages a year, which means you'll be reading around 18 books a year. Furthermore, rereading, highlighting, or circling useful information, makes it easier for you to recall what is of most value to you.
Next up is writing. Why should this be useful to us? Well writing for just five to 10 minutes every morning will accelerate your personal growth, writing down your thoughts, feelings, and insights in particular, can be highly beneficial. This allows you to focus on the things you have already achieved, as well as on the goals you want to reach in the future.
Customize your miracle morning
Customize your miracle morning to make it fit your own specific needs. Now that you've been introduced to six morning habits that can bring you satisfaction and success, it's important to learn how to tailor them to fit your needs. You can take less or more time, depending on what is best for you. If you like, you can use 60 minutes in the morning to prepare yourself for the day and divide the hour in different ways. For instance, you could do 10 minutes of each activity, or you could work out for 30 minutes and dedicate five minutes to all the other activities, if you think you'd benefit more from the exercise. Even a few minutes is better than nothing. So, if you're fretting about the idea of adding anything else to your schedule, just take six minutes and break them up, like so. Minute one, sit in silence. Minute two, recite your affirmations. Minute three, visualize your day going perfectly. Minute four, note down some things to be grateful for and what you want to achieve during the day. Minute five, read two pages of a book. And finally, minute six, do some push ups and crunches. To add even more freedom to your new routine, the time and place of your miracle morning can also be flexible. If you work night shifts, you could also do your miracle morning when you wake much later in the day.
Make your miracle morning a habit
Make your Miracle Morning a new habit by having an accountability partner and committing to a 30-day challenge. Like any healthy habit, the Miracle Morning works best when you commit to it and do it regularly. One effective way to make this happen is to seek out an accountability partner to help you stick to your commitment. We've all had those days when we intended to go to the gym but didn't because we just didn't feel like it. However, if we had a friend there waiting for us, we would be far more motivated to show up. We're more adherent when other people hold us accountable for our behaviour. That way, you can both call each other to make sure you're on track.
If finding someone is tricky, you could also join an online community. We know that it takes around 30 days to form a habit. The first 10 days can be difficult and particularly hard to bear. The next 10 days become easier, but still feel foreign and somewhat disagreeable. However, during the last 10 days, your new habit will become part of your identity and you will start to enjoy it.
A fulfilling life starts with our morning ritual
The key message of this is that the answer to a successful, fulfilling life lies in our morning ritual. Silence, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading, and writing. Completing these simple activities first thing every morning sets the tone for an effective, successful day ahead, and, in turn, has a profoundly positive effect on our life in general. How can you apply these ideas to your life?
Get happy about tomorrow. Before you go to sleep, think about what you could look forward to in the next morning. Are you meeting with a dear friend? Are you simply looking forward to a delicious breakfast? Finding reasons to be excited about the next day will make it easier to get up in the mornings. Find a miracle morning partner, significantly increase your chances of making a lasting commitment some miracle mornings by having a buddy system. You and a partner support one another and hold each other accountable to your new morning habits.