I’ve always been a morning person but only lately realized how much I can affect the rest of the day by having a morning routine to follow. I’ve noticed how I spend the first 30-60 minutes of the morning will ultimately carry over to how productive I will be for the next 12-16 hours. Those first minutes will also directly correlate to how my mood is for the rest of the day. Well, there are exceptions on some days but generally this works.
Let me first tell you what I used to do in the morning: Alarm goes off and I roll over and grab my phone to check Facebook, Twitter and email. The next 10-20 minutes is spent scrolling news feeds and reading emails while trying to eat breakfast. None which are extremely time sensitive. I am yet to ever open Facebook and feel enormous relief that I saw a video of monkey doing a heavy metal version of river dance.
After this I usually drink coffee while on YouTube watching either old hockey highlights or clips of Slash playing the solo of Paradise City. Both which are awesome but not necessarily what gets me moving forward. By now my attention span for something productive is non-existent and I find it extremely hard to focus on anything. I am feeling frustrated for not getting anything done and it feeds directly to my mood for the rest of the day.
One might argue that I should stop doing what I am doing as I realize it happening. Very true but I’ve found it easier to avoid getting into that situation altogether and rather focus on preventing it from happening in the first case.
Which leads me to my current routine that I’ve found success with: Alarm goes off and I’ll get out of bed immediately. I’ll make my way to the kitchen, load up the french press and do my meditation routine. Recently I’ve been experimenting with rolling on the floor for 10 minutes opening up my hips with various mobility drills and sitting postures.
Meditation is probably the biggest positive change that I’ve made the past year and I have to give credit to Mark Divine’s The Way of The SEAL as it made me understand that meditating isn’t just an “airy fairy”-thing to do but can actually benefit anyone. There’s also heap of scientific data to back this up.
After getting in to the right head space with meditation I’ll make my coffee and read some sort of non-fiction book for up to 30 minutes. I might even go through books I’ve read previously and check what I’ve highlighted just to enforce what I’ve learned.
Once all this is done I have all this positive energy to spend on writing (such as this blog post), focus on professional development, write training programs for clients or to hang out with the Mrs. I feel great as the day has just started but I’ve already made progress to be better and calmer than what I was the day before.
On a workday the above is more or less the same. The only difference being that I try to read something directly work related before stepping into the gym.
Because of this routine I actually look forward to my morning commute. As long as it doesn’t rain.
Three takeaways from this post to make your morning a success:
1. Have a routine (use your decision making on something else than what to have for breakfast)
2. Clear your head (meditate, go for a walk, pray or just quiet time. Whatever works for you)
3. Learn something new (read or listen to a podcast or a book)
There you have it, that’s what gets me fired up in the morning. Comment on below what you normally do in the morning to get the day started on a positive note! I am always looking for new ideas!
Album I listened to while crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s:
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