Morning Routine
The two most important routines in your life are your Evening Routine and your Morning Routine. Get these right and the rest of the day will take care of itself. We already covered the Evening Routine, so now let’s jump into the Morning Routine.
Most people wake up after hitting the snooze button a few times, and the first thing they do is grab their phone and start reading emails, texts, online news, and social media feeds. This automatically puts them in reactive mode, mired in minutiae, depressed, and stressed out. They’re effectively stuck on that life raft we talked about in the beginning, blown by the wind and pushed by the current.
Instead, start every day off right with the transformative power of a Morning Routine.
Virtually every personal development expert focuses on establishing a consistent Morning Routine. Their recommendations vary, which is fine because ultimately you should experiment and customize your Morning Routine to work best for you.
Here’s how Jack D. Hodge puts it in his book ‘The Power of Habit’: “Early morning is the most critical time of each day. How you spend the beginning hours of your day sets the stage for the remaining hours. If you purposefully establish a routine for spending your early morning as you want to, you will have taken a giant step toward spending the rest of your life the way you want to. How we spend our mornings is the litmus test for our degree of self-mastery. Do we wake up with a plan for the day or are we scrambling, wasting time figuring out what we must do? If we have a plan for the day, do we consistently follow it? Do we follow a purposefully predetermined, set routine which makes us more efficient and productive, and allows more time to think and relax? Or do we haphazardly scramble to get ready and out the door to make it to work just in time? Our mornings expose the power of our routines. Whether our routines are made up of good habits or bad habits is most evident in how we spend our early morning hours. If we are to get the most out of life and come closer to reaching our potential, it’s crucial that we establish good morning habits that allow us to more effectively utilize our early morning hours.”
Next, we’ll talk about Hal Elrod’s seminal book, ‘The Miracle Morning’ which is focused completely on establishing the habit of a Morning Routine. It’s a great book, a quick and easy read, and it’s easy to understand and quickly implement the principles he teaches and get immediate and life-changing results. I absolutely love the book and the concepts that Hal teaches, and I always recommend this as the first book that someone should read if they are just getting started with Personal Development. It’s sold over 3 million copies and been translated into 37 languages, and changed lives for millions of people.
Let’s go over Hal’s Miracle Morning as a starting point. Although he promotes a one hour Morning Routine, Hal also says you can do your Miracle Morning in as short as 6 minutes! So you can and should customize both what you do and how long you spend, to make it work in your life. But let’s start with his routine and you can modify from there.
The Miracle Morning consists of what Hal calls the SAVERS, which is an acronym for Silence, Affirmations, Visualization, Exercise, Reading, and Scribing.
Silence: This could be prayer, meditation, yoga, controlled breathing, or just sitting in silence. The idea is to give yourself a peaceful, stress-free time to start your day.
Affirmations: They are scientifically proven to be effective, and I can personally attest to them working in my life. They work by reprogramming your subconscious mind, which scientists tell us controls at least 90% of our actions. Affirmations can help you achieve your goals, overcome limiting beliefs, and reprogram your self-identity. Since it is a fundamental law of human behavior that you will act in accordance with your self-identity, you can see how reprogramming it via affirmations is critical to creating positive change in your life.
Visualization: We’ve already talked about taking time every day to visualize yourself living your ideal future life. There’s also another type of visualization, which is to visualize yourself having a successful day. This is similar to what athletes do, where they repeatedly envision themselves shooting the winning basket, kicking the winning goal, or performing the perfect gymnastics routine. They have done it perfectly in their mind so many times, that it carries over into their actual performance. There’s research showing that it is actually just as effective for an athlete to visualize their sport as to practice it in real life. So you can do the same, and visualize yourself winning in your various activities of the day, and that will make it more likely that you will in fact win the day.
Exercise: Hal advocates 20 minutes of exercise in his Miracle Morning. If your schedule allows you to do a full workout as part of your Morning Routine, that’s ideal, because if you plan to work out later in the day, sometimes things come up that prevent you from doing so or your willpower gas tank may be too low to get yourself to follow through. But if not, at least get some exercise in the morning to boost your energy and mood.
Reading: Everyone should read at least 15 minutes for personal and professional development every day. I’ve been reading personal and professional development books for decades, and I’ve compiled the best ones into my Recommended Book List, with descriptions of each.
Scribing: This is just another word for writing. This could be a free-form or structured journal, or a Gratitude Journal. We’ll talk more about the importance and benefits of a Gratitude Journal a bit later in the program.
I recommend starting with Hal’s SAVERS as your Morning Routine. Personally, I’ve moved my 5 year Visualization and Scribing (Journaling) to my Evening Routine and instead added a few things to the SAVERS: The first thing I do every morning is smile, because smiling makes you happy. I also review my Values, as well as reviewing my 5 year, 1 year, and quarterly goals, and reviewing my Happiful Planner for the day. I also do stretching and some breathing exercises. And then, as the last part of my Morning Routine, I do the #1 most important action on my Happiful Planner for the day.
I do all of this before I check email or texts, because that way I can actually do my Morning Routine instead of getting sidetracked. Now you can see another benefit of the Disconnect part of our Evening Routine – it sets you up for your Morning Routine.
To start with, make it easy to succeed and establish the habit: follow Hal’s SAVERS but only spend a minute or two on each one, and then you can gradually increase the time as well as modify your routine to personalize it for yourself.
Action Steps:
Schedule time in your calendar each morning for your Morning Routine, including how long you’ll spend on each element and when you will begin.
Decide how you will execute on each element of the SAVERS: What will you do for Silence? You’ll need some Affirmations. (We cover Affirmations in the full Be Happiful Course.) What will you do for Exercise? Pick out a personal development book to read from our Recommended Book List.
Add the steps of your Morning Routine to your Daily Commitments Checklist to keep you on track and reinforce the habit.
As soon as you have consistently implemented the Evening Routine and the Morning Routine, you should see dramatic improvements in your life, and be on your path to Happiful.