It’s no use just waking up early. What is more important is that you wake up better and more willing. What’s the use of getting up early, feeling miserable and sleepy? Let me ask you some questions to see if this conversation is for you: Do you want to start all your days in a positive way? Would you like to take care of your mind, body and productivity first thing in the morning? Do you have trouble waking up early? Do you have more than one alarm triggered because you never wake up the first time it goes off? Do you press the snooze button several times to take a few more minutes of sleep?
If the answer is YES, let me tell you that in 2016, Hal Elrod published a book called The “Miracle Morning.” The book promises to improve your mornings as well as your life. This book gained popularity among people who wanted to wake up earlier, have more energy and produce their best more often.
At the Arata Academy Summary today, you will discover our approach to implementing the key ideas and concepts behind the Miracle Morning. You will now learn how to create and perfect your morning routine for your life and will wake up in a far better mood.
A productive day depends on a productive morning.
The main idea you have to understand is that a productive day depends on a productive morning. And a productive morning basically depends on waking up at the time you chose and following a morning ritual that you laid out.
When you start the day with quality, you are using CONSISTENCY in your favour. Consistency is a powerful aspect of human behaviour. If you start well, the tendency is for you to be consistent throughout the day, meaning you keep making good choices. This results in a full day of top quality choices.
The opposite is also true: when you do not make good choices early in the morning, your consistency behaviour mechanism realizes that it is acceptable to make other bad choices throughout the day. So do not make exceptions. Do not keep changing your mind about your plans. If you have previously planned to do something, DO IT. This reinforces the fact that you are a person who does not cheat on their own goals. Consistency.
Unproductive mornings generate less productive days. And unproductive days generate an unproductive life. Therefore, the quality of your life depends on the quality of your mornings.
Having a morning ritual is key to getting up at the right time and having the willingness to do what needs to be done. That is why in the course ‘Planning Your Life’ we will do a series of activities together to prepare and execute all the steps of your planning and organization, including the morning routine.
What does waking up at the right time mean? It means that you clearly work out the best time for you so that you don’t hit the snooze button on your phone to put off getting up. You want to wake up with excitement, with a genuine desire to get up to live your day.
When you press the snooze button you are avoiding waking up with a sense of purpose. You are telling yourself that you do not want to wake up to your life and to the things you are going to have to experience that day.
Think about the happiest days of your life, which may be when you took a trip or when you were celebrating something special. You probably did not press the snooze button because you really wanted to get up and enjoy that occasion. Celebrate that day.
To have that enthusiasm, establish what you will do when you wake up the night before. This helps to clarify your goals. You will have more incentive to wake up and live life according to your own terms. Set your alarm clock to the desired time and leave the alarm clock well away from your bed to make it impossible for you to press the snooze button and go back to sleep.
When the alarm clock rings on the other side of the room, get up, turn off the alarm clock and go directly to brush your teeth. Overcome the temptation to go back to bed and sleep for a few more minutes, as this is a way of cheating on your goals. Early in the morning, you want to be a coherent, consistent person who makes good choices throughout the whole day.
Six practices to save your mornings
Here at Arata Academy I always support you to use your intelligence and your creativity to customize your approach according to your needs. Therefore, it is you who will create your own morning ritual. As an illustrative example, I will explain to you that the morning ritual of “The Miracle Morning” consists of six practices: silence, affirmations, visualizations, physical exercises, reading, and writing.
These practices form the acronym SAVERS: Silence, Affirmations, Visualization, Exercise, Reading, Scribing.
These life saviours are the six things you need to do as you wake up in order to have an extremely positive and productive day.
Let’s look at each one of them?
Use silence to listen to your inner voice
Silence is the practice of meditation, prayer or any other kind of reflection that makes sense to you. In the midst of such a hectic world, it is essential that you have your moments of silence to listen to your inner voice.
This is a way to start the day slowly, in a contemplative way. This puts you in a completely different state of mind than if you woke up terrified of being late, or turning on the television or checking social media on your phone.
The problem of waking up and running off to some appointment, watching television or checking social media is that it puts you in a reactive state of mind. Instead of living your morning in a way that makes you more aware of what is important to you, these activities focus your attention on what is important to others.
Take advantage of these valuable first minutes of your day to practice silence, reflection and gratitude. This will have a profound impact on the rest of your day.
Soon after this reflection, move on to the affirmations.
Review your intentions clearly through affirmations
Affirmations are things you say to yourself by establishing your aims for that day. What did you discover whilst you were practising silence? What is truly important to you today? Formulate sentences and affirmations that increase your level of clarity.
Whether you do this consciously or not, you spend the day having various thoughts as a kind of internal monologue. This monologue can be useful to increase your quality of life … or it can be harmful, making your day miserable. To have useful thoughts, you need to articulate clearly what it is that you want to see happening in every area of your life.
For example, let’s imagine you’re on a weight-loss diet. First thing in the morning, you should state that you want to follow the diet during that day. This will help you achieve your goal. You can commit to eating healthy foods and avoiding what is bad for you. So, your morning affirmations help you to keep in mind exactly how you should behave throughout the day.
In addition to reviewing specific goals and behaviours for the day, the statements can also be broader and deeper. Affirmations at an identity level help define the type of person you want to be.
For example, if you are experiencing relationship difficulties with your husband or wife, you can use the affirmation that you are a person who does their best to communicate with respect. That you are the person who above all, actively listens to the needs of the other person. And that you use emotional intelligence to communicate your needs in a non-violent way. That you are a person who practices empathy. All of these are affirmations at an identity level about the kind of person you are.
Visualize what your ideal day will look like
The third practice of morning ritual is visualization. Visualization complements the affirmations.
If, for example, you said to yourself that you were going to spend the day following your diet, eating healthy foods and avoiding what is bad for you, now is the time to visualize how you will do this.
You can close your eyes and imagine what your breakfast, lunch, and dinner will look like. You can see the body you want to have, the health you deserve to have and the energy you will gain by eating better.
To make this practice even more powerful, you can create a vision board.
This vision board uses images to represent what you want. You can grab magazines and crop pictures that represent what you want. You can find the images on the internet and print them out. Or you can even keep everything in an album on your phone.
This will give you a clear picture of everything you want to achieve in your day and, consequently, in your life.
Move your body early in the day
So far you’ve only taken care of your mind. The fourth step of the ritual is to work your body a little in the morning. With hectic lives, we tend to leave physical activity for later. And then ‘later’ turns into never. If we leave physical exercise until the end of the day, we are already too tired or simply out of time. Prioritize your health.
If you do not have time to go to the gym to do your main workout, you can take 10 or 15 minutes to do the same workout at home. You can do a high-intensity interval workout with just your body weight, or even a short yoga session.
Choose an exercise that best suits you and your mornings. Here, consistency is more important than the intensity or the time of your workout.
By doing this, your body will be energized for the rest of the day.
Reading and writing should also be part of your morning
The final two steps of the morning ritual are ones which few people do. I’m talking about the simple act of reading and writing.
First, you should read. But do not read what your friends posted on social networks. Do not read the news websites or even the newspaper.
Here you should be reading valuable material that makes you develop as a person. It can be a technical book of your professional field. It could be fictional literature that makes you think. It may just be something you want to learn. Learn how to invest better and have more financial wealth. Learn how to communicate better and have better relationships. Learn new languages. Your continued improvement.
Usually, we leave reading to the end of the day when we are already tired. That’s why we often end up not reading.
If you read early in the morning, you will read a lot more books than most people. If you only read ten pages a day, you can read three thousand, six hundred and fifty pages a year. This means that you will read an average of eighteen books per year.
After reading, the last step of the ritual is to write. Write a diary with everything you have absorbed during your silence, your affirmations, and your visualization. Write about how you felt when you were exercising. Write about what you have learned from the book you just read. Write down what your new commitments are with yourself and what tasks you will accomplish. Write down what you did yesterday and what lessons were learned. Write what you are grateful for in life.
By writing things down, you organize your thoughts. This makes it much easier to transform what was once just an abstract dream into concrete reality.
After writing, your morning ritual has come to an end. Now you can have your breakfast and prepare to go to work knowing that you have already taken care of your mind and body with a great start to the day. By being consistent your next choices will also be top quality ones.
You only need an hour to change your life.
For those who wake up and run off to work because they are already late, doing a morning ritual like this may seem completely unfeasible.
But all you need is an hour to complete the six life saviours of the example presented. Five minutes in silence, five minutes for affirmations and five minutes for visualization.
Then twenty minutes of exercise followed by twenty minutes of reading. Finally another five minutes of writing.
If you really don’t have available time to do this in your morning, you can do an experiment by waking up an hour earlier. This is possible by choosing to sleep an hour earlier.
It may be that the change in your sleep schedule is rewarded by a positive state of mind while you take care of your mind and body early in the morning. Maybe not. Only you will be able to say after you try it.
For the days when you really do not have time for anything, there is a minimalist version of the ritual that can be done in just six minutes. In this version, you should devote just one minute to each of the six life saviours.
Wake up calmly, and after a good stretch, just sit on the bed and be purposefully silent for one minute. During the next minute, make your daily affirmations, reminding yourself who you want to be and putting meaning into what you want to do in the day which has just begun.
In the third minute, you close your eyes and visualize what you want for your life. Then, pick up your diary and write down some of the things you are grateful for, which you are proud of, and the results you are committed to achieving that day.
Next, you take the book you are reading and simply read one or two pages, which you can read in a minute.
Finally, you get out of bed and spend the last minute moving for sixty seconds. Opt for simple exercises you can do right there, such as push-ups, jumping jacks, or sit-ups.
Adapting to Your Own Miracle Morning
Practising silence, making affirmations and visualizations, moving the body, reading and writing are all activities that can benefit everyone.
But that does not mean that everyone should follow exactly the same morning ritual. Each of us is different and has different needs and limitations.
Therefore, the ideal approach is to adapt the morning ritual to your lifestyle and the time you have available.
For example, if you can not exercise in the morning without it negatively affecting your other tasks, do not blame yourself. Do not let perfectionism get in the way. Simply do the ritual that fits into your routine and allow yourself to exercise at another time of the day.
The miracle morning will only happen if it is consistent in your life. To be consistent it needs to be something pleasurable. Therefore, include activities that help you achieve your goals and that are possible to accomplish.
As well as this, keep the ritual fresh, fun and exciting. Change the way you practice silence. Change the exercises. Read different types of books.
In the end, the morning ritual is a habit. You have already seen on the Arata Academy channel that we have lots of material on how to create habits. Like every habit, the morning ritual needs time to be created. The important thing is for you to maintain consistency and begin to do the ritual as soon as you wake up. This is the trick to success.
Also, the ritual itself must be its own reward. You need to feel good when you are doing the activities as well as after doing the activities. If it’s unenjoyable to do, it’s not worth doing.
The quality of your life depends on the quality of your days. And the quality of your days is strongly influenced by the way you start your days.
Creating and maintaining a morning ritual that makes you feel good in the very first hour is an excellent habit for anyone who wants to add more productivity, achievement and satisfaction to their lives.
Thus, the morning ritual is one of the essential parts of good life planning. If you want to go beyond and develop a complete life plan, the Arata Academy has a new course dedicated especially to this, which you can visit this link.