Own Your Mornings

This is not a post about the awesomeness of 5am club, a 17-step morning routine to conquer the world, or meditating for an hour before your cold plunge infrared sauna combo.  It is about protecting what is yours, setting yourself up for success and only inviting the world (and it’s potential drama) into your day on your terms.  

First thing in the morning, once you have opened your eyes, stop inviting your boss, colleagues, friends, and family members to come and come and jump in bed with you!

Essentially, if the first thing you do each day is open up your phone and start the ‘connected but not really connecting carousel’ by flicking, responding and opening up things that really can wait, then you are essentially inviting all or any of these people to come and jump in bed with you and steal that really important early morning window of opportunity.

Sometimes people can bring positivity into your morning, but it can also be their drama, negativity, problems, demands or opinions you just don’t need as soon as you’ve opened up your peepers.

First thing in the morning is a precious time of opportunity, the first 20mins after waking you’re in the alpha stage, which is known to be a gateway to your powerful subconscious mind, a powerful semi-daydream state desperate to sponge information and content.

So, if you nourish yourself with positive activities, thoughts and habits you can set yourself up for a positive and productive day.  Alternatively, you feed your brain with some quick hits on the dopamine lottery, (you don’t really know what messages you’ll have, emails or what is going to pop up on your socials feeds) and you start your day distracted, disconnected and jumping from thought to thought.  There is a fairly high chance that is how your day is going to continue.

Consider this, you are due to start work at 9am, but you are on your phone at 7.45 as you get ready. Not only are you stealing your own morning, but you are giving those hours to your job, for free. You’re diluting your daily rate, and of course, this adds up and dilutes the time-for-money agreement you have signed.

Here are a few things that you can do easily which don’t involve your boss or colleagues nuzzling in on your mornings…

✍🏻  Get writing. Grab a paper and pen and just start writing, maybe set a 5-10 minute timer and write down whatever thoughts and feelings pop into your head. Explore them and unravel them.

☀️ Get some sunlight. Open the curtains, and get some early light into your eyeballs, better still get outside if possible.

✅  Do your essentials intentionally, make your bed, look out the window, make a coffee, brush your teeth, take a shower, make your breakfast, pack your bag. It doesn’t matter what you include in your essentials. Just do each activity thinking about each part of the task, how does your coffee smell? How does the water feel on your skin in the shower? How many strokes do you take to brush your teeth?

🤔  Have a morning ponder. Sit somewhere comfortably and think about the day ahead, how do you want your day to go? How can you make that happen? What do you want to achieve?

There are literally hundreds of things which you can do first thing which are for you, don’t involve your screens, and can set you up for a successful day ahead.

You get to choose how you start your day. Making intentional morning choices is low-hanging high-performance fruit.