Life is busy. It can feel impossible to move toward your dreams. If you have a full-time job and kids, it’s even harder.
How do you move forward?
If you don’t purposefully carve time out every day to
progress and improve —without question, your time will get lost in the
vacuum of our increasingly crowded lives. Before you know it, you’ll be
old and withered, wondering where all that time went.
As Harold Hill has said: “You pile up
enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you are left with nothing but a lot of
empty yesterdays.”
Rethinking Your Life and Getting Out of Survival Mode
This article is intended to challenge you
to rethink your entire approach to life. The purpose is to help you
simplify and get back to the fundamentals.
Sadly, most people’s lives are filled to
the brim with the nonessential and trivial. They don’t have time to
build toward anything meaningful.
They are in survival mode. Are you in survival mode?
Like Bilbo, most of us are like butter
scraped over too much bread. Unfortunately, the bread is not even our
own, but someone else’s. Very few have taken the time to take their
lives into their own hands.
It was social and cultural to live our
lives on other people’s terms, just one generation ago. And many
millennials are perpetuating this process simply because it’s the only
worldview we’ve been taught.
However, there is a growing
collective-consciousness that with a lot of work and intention , you can
live every moment of your life on your own terms.
You are the designer of your destiny.
You are responsible.
You get to decide. You must decide — because if you don’t, someone else will. Indecision is a bad decision.
With this short morning routine, your life will quickly change.
It may seem like a long list. But in short, it’s really quite simple:
- Wake up
- Get in the zone
- Get moving
- Put the right food in your body
- Get ready
- Get inspired
- Get perspective
- Do something to move you forward
Let’s begin:
1. Get A Healthy 7+ Hours of Sleep
Let’s face it : sleep is just as important
as eating and drinking water. Despite this, millions of people do not
sleep enough and experience insane problems as a result.
The National Sleep Foundation (NSF)
conducted surveys revealing that at least 40 million Americans suffer
from more than 70 different sleep disorders; furthermore, 60 percent of
adults, and 69 percent of children, experience one or more sleep
problems a few nights or more during a week.
In addition, more than 40 percent of adults
experience daytime sleepiness severe enough to interfere with their
daily activities at least a few days each month — with 20 percent
reporting problem sleepiness a few days a week or more.
On the flip side, getting a healthy amount of sleep is linked to:
- Increased memory
- Longer life
- Decreased inflammation
- Increased creativity
- Increased attention and focus
- Decreased fat and increased muscle mass with exercise
- Lower stress
- Decreased dependence on stimulants like caffeine
- Decreased risk of getting into accidents
- Decreased risk of depression
- And tons more… Google it.
The rest of this article is worthless if
you don’t make sleep a priority. Who cares if you wake up at 5 a.m. if
you went to bed three hours earlier?
You won’t last long.
You may use stimulants to compensate, but
that isn’t sustainable. In the long run, your health will fall apart.
The goal needs to be long-term sustainability.
2. Prayer and Meditation to Facilitate Clarity and Abundance
After waking from a healthy and restful
sleep session, prayer and meditation are crucial for orienting yourself
toward the positive. What you focus on expands.
Prayer and meditation facilitate intense
gratitude for all that you have. Gratitude is having an abundance
mindset. When you think abundantly, the world is your oyster. There is
limitless opportunity and possibility for you.
People are magnets. When you’re grateful
for what you have, you will attract more of the positive and good.
Gratitude is contagious.
Gratitude may be the most important key to success. It has been called the mother of all virtues.
If you start every morning putting yourself
in a space of gratitude and clarity, you will attract the best the
world has to offer, and not get distracted.
3. Hard Physical Activity
Despite endless evidence of the need for
exercise, only one-third of American men and women between the ages of
25 to 64 years engage in regular physical activity according to the
Center for Disease Control’s National Health Interview Survey.
If you want to be among the healthy, happy
and productive people in the world, get in the habit of regular
exercise. Many people go immediately to the gym to get their body
moving. I have lately found that doing yard work in the wee hours of the
morning generates an intense inflow of inspiration and clarity.
Whatever your preference, get your body moving.
Exercise has been found to decrease your
chance of depression, anxiety and stress. It is also related to higher
success in your career.
If you don’t care about your body, every other aspect of your life will suffer. Humans are holistic beings.
4. Consume 30 Grams of Protein
Donald Layman, professor emeritus of
nutrition at the University of Illinois, recommends consuming at least
30 grams of protein for breakfast. Similarly, Tim Ferriss, in his book, The 4-Hour Body, also recommends 30 grams of protein 30 minutes after awaking.
According to Mr. Ferriss, his father did this and lost 19 pounds in one month.
Protein-rich foods keep you full longer
than other foods because they take longer to leave the stomach. Also,
protein keeps blood-sugar levels steady, which prevent spikes in hunger.
Eating protein first decreases your white
carbohydrate cravings, which are the types of carbs that get you fat.
Think bagels, toast and donuts.
Mr. Ferriss makes four recommendations for getting adequate protein in the morning:
- Eat at least 40% of your breakfast calories as protein
- Do it with two or three whole eggs (each egg has about six grams of protein)
- If you don’t like eggs, use something like turkey bacon, organic pork bacon or sausage, or cottage cheese
- Or, you could always do a protein shake with water
5. Take a Cold Shower
Tony Robbins starts every morning by jumping into a 57-degree Fahrenheit swimming pool.
Why would he do such a thing?
Cold water immersion radically facilitates
physical and mental wellness. When practiced regularly, it provides
long-lasting changes to your body’s immune, lymphatic, circulatory and
digestive systems that improve the quality of your life. It can also
increase weight loss because it boosts your metabolism.
A 2007 research study found that taking
cold showers routinely can help treat symptoms of depression often more
effectively than prescription medications. That’s because cold water
triggers a wave of mood-boosting neurochemicals, which make you feel
happy.
There is, of course, an initial fear of
stepping into a cold shower. Without a doubt, if you’ve tried this
before, you have found yourself standing outside the shower dreading the
thought of going in.
You may have even talked yourself out of it and said, “Maybe tomorrow.” And turned the hot water handle before getting in.
Or, maybe you jumped in but quickly turned the hot water on?
What has helped me is thinking about it
like a swimming pool. It’s a slow painful death to get into a cold pool
slowly. You just need to jump in. After 20 seconds, you’re fine.
It’s the same way with taking a cold
shower. You get in, your heart starts beating like crazy. Then, after 20
seconds, you feel fine.
To me, it increases my willpower and boosts
my creativity and inspiration. While standing with the cold water
hitting my back, I practice slowing my breath and calm down. After I’ve
chilled out, I feel super-happy and inspired. Lots of ideas start
flowing and I become motived to achieve my goals.
6. Listen to/Read Uplifting Content
Ordinary people seek entertainment.
Extraordinary people seek education and learning. It is common for the
world’s most successful people to read at least one book per week. They
are constantly learning.
I can easily get through one audiobook per week by just listening during my commute to school and while walking on campus.
Taking even 15–30 minutes every morning to
read uplifting and instructive information changes you. It puts you in
the zone to perform at your highest.
Over a long enough period of time, you will
have read hundreds of books. You’ll be knowledgeable on several topics.
You’ll think and see the world differently. You’ll be able to make more
connections between different topics.
7. Review Your Life Vision
Your goals should be written down — short
term and long term. Taking just a few minutes to read your life vision
puts your day into perspective.
If you read your long-term goals every day,
you will think about them every day. If you think about them every day,
and spend your days working toward them, they’ll manifest.
Achieving goals is a science. There’s no
confusion or ambiguity to it. If you follow a simple pattern, you can
accomplish all of your goals, no matter how big they are.
A fundamental aspect of that is writing them down and reviewing them every single day.
8. Do at Least One Thing Toward Long-Term Goals
Willpower is like a muscle that depletes
when it is exercised. Similarly, our ability to make high quality
decisions becomes fatigued over time. The more decisions you make, the
lower quality they become — the weaker your willpower.
Consequently, you need to do the hard stuff first thing in the morning. The important stuff.
If you don’t, it simply will not get done.
By the end of your day, you’ll be exhausted. You’ll be fried. There will
be a million reasons to just start tomorrow. And you will start
tomorrow —which is never.
So your mantra becomes: The worst comes first. Do that thing you’ve been needing to do. Then do it again tomorrow.
If you take just one step toward your big goals every day, you’ll realize those goals weren’t really far away.
Conclusion
After you’ve done this, no matter what you
have for the rest of your day, you’ll have done the important stuff
first. You’ll have put yourself in a place to succeed. You’ll have
inched toward your dreams.
Because you’ll have done all these things,
you’ll show up better in life. You’ll be better at your job. You’ll be
better in your relationships. You’ll be happier. You’ll be more
confident. You’ll be more bold and daring. You’ll have more clarity and
vision.
Your life will shortly change.
You can’t have mornings like this
consistently without waking up to all that is incongruent in your life.
Those things you despise will meet their demise. They’ll disappear and
never return.
You’ll quickly find you’re doing the work you’re passionate about.
Your relationships will be passionate, meaningful, deep and fun!
You will have freedom and abundance.
The world, and the universe, will respond to you in beautiful ways.
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