3 STEPS TO TAKE BEFORE DESIGNING YOUR MORNING ROUTINE.

Do you have a morning routine?

Or are you trying to stick to one but feeling on and off and not sure if it makes sense or it´s just a waste of time?

🤔

Whenever I ask people what their biggest struggle is with healthy habits and routines, most of them say it´s the consistency. And if it's your case too, you might find this post helpful.

Whenever consistency is a struggle, there is lack of clarity.

Reasons like - it´s good for my health and I should be doing it because I need to lose some weight won´t get you far.

Not even good intentions and motivation will get you where you want to be… if you know where it is you want to be…🤷🏼‍♀️

1️⃣ WHAT DO YOU WANT?

Clarity is the step nr. 1.

It is your deepest WHY behind your actions. 

What are your goals and aspirations? What is it that you want?

Is it that you want to get rid of that back pain for good? Or is it that you want to build a new business and stop working for someone else, or you want to retire in 3 or 5 years from now and move to another country?

You need to get clear about this, write it down and start to talk about it with family and friends. The fact that you start sharing your dreams and goals will hold you accountable for making it happen.

2️⃣ WHO DO YOU NEED TO BECOME?

Now that you are clear about what you want to achieve, the next question to answer is - Who do I need to become in order to achieve my goal?

This is important, because our life is basically a sum of our daily habits and automated actions. If you are in a place you want to leave or change, you need to change your identity.

But hey, I´m not talking about faking and pretending you are someone else. 🙃

By developing daily habits that cultivate certain qualities your identity will eventually change.

For example if you think of yourself now that you are unfit, but you create a daily routine with exercise, eventually you will become a fit person, a runner or a weight lifter. If you want to build a business but you spend your free time binge watching Netflix, you will need to use that time developing qualities that are necessary to become a business owner and learn new skills in order to achieve your goals.

So, take your specific goal and envision successful people who already achieved it.

How do they spend their time? What skills or knowledge do they have? How do they take care of their optimal health so that they have all the energy to build their empires? What do they read, what podcasts do they listen to, what kinds of media do they consume? 

Take some time to learn about them, do the research and write it down. I promise it is very inspiring, motivating and it might get you started to build a solid foundation for your habits and routines.

3️⃣ CREATE AN ACTION  PLAN

Knowing your goals and the person you want to become, will bring you automatically to a series of habits you need to develop.

Comparing your ideal avatar with your current self will show you exactly what to include to your routines and what to focus on. 

Let´s say you want to build a business that would give you financial freedom, but at the moment your health is not good, your back hurts and you suffer from anxiety because your income is unstable. Acknowledging these facts is essential and in this case the main focus would be to achieve optimal health. Because no matter what is on your vision board, while you live in pain, if you are constantly sick you won´t get anywhere. A great combination of habits to include in your daily routine would be daily exercise, anti-inflammatory food choices, meditation, journaling or learning. If your mind starts with objections like -I don´t have time for all of these, remember I want to build a business??, let me tell you something.

Without a healthy foundation you won´t get anywhere, or you might become the richest person in the cemetery. 🤦🏼‍♀️

So if you are saying you don´t have time for your wellbeing, it is a good sign that you need a morning routine.

What I love about morning routines is that they are like some kind of a daily bootcamp squeezed in digestible bites of activities. The point here is not the amount of time you spend doing each of the activities, but the fact that you show up every day and just do it, no matter how much your mind is complaining about it. 

The more digestible are the bites, the more chances that you´ll stick to your routines.

Most people don´t have 2 hours available every morning for exercising, meditating, reading… but even 2 min of daily meditation and 15 min of stretching will deliver better results as opposed to 1 hour in a gym from time to time.

There is another amazing outcome of having and doing a morning routine no matter what. 🙌🏼

It creates grit and trains consistency. And I don´t know more useful qualities for building a business than these two.

As well as there are days when the only thing you want is to snooze that alarm, but you resist and do your routine anyway, there will be days in your business building journey when you want to postpone that newsletter or campaign because you would rather spend a night out with friends. 

But thanks to the mini bootcamp of a morning routine cultivating grit, you will do the work anyway and eventually become that person you always wanted to be!

Small changes in context can lead to large changes in behavior over time. (James Clear)

Now, before you jump into the creation of your morning routine, hold on a minute… I have a FREE Morning Routine Workbook for you that might be helpful in the process. Because another important element of a morning routine is that it needs to be personalized - tailor made according to your unique body, your special needs and goals.

If you just copy someone else's routine, the chances you won't stick to it are very high.

It will also take some time to try different activities and observe what works best for you and what delivers the best results.

Be patient, playful and creative.

But most of all - enjoy the ride and do it no matter what. Once you come up with your best sequence it becomes easy, your body will ask for it and you will look forward to it.

Are you wondering, what my morning routine looks like? 

The first thing I do in the morning is to get out. Not only because I have a dog (I would do it anyway), but because getting fresh air into my lungs during my run or a power walk feels amazing to me. I run 3 times a week alternating it power walks in between. Then I stretch to avoid stiffness, then shower, including a cold shower in the end. After that I´m really awake! Green juice or a smoothie follows and then coffee and I´m ready for my day. I like to tweak my routine according to what I need. At the beginning of the pandemic I was meditating daily, which was helping me with the lockdown anxiety. Now I´m all about strengthening my immune system and my mind through the very uncomfortable cold showers.

Feeling inspired now? Go and grab my FREE Morning Routine Workbook that will help you design your perfect sequence and let me know in the comments, or in my Holistic Pain Relief FB group how it goes.