The best cheat sheet for creating a morning routine!
Your days are full of checking off tasks just to check them off, negative self talk about what you did last night, and you need to get that haircut scheduled. I see you, and I get it because I have been there, but I am not anymore. What if I told you a quick morning habit would help you begin to feel better about yourself and your day?
These go to morning routine strategies will get you started on creating your morning routine by creating intentionality about your day and how you want to show up in it, helping you be grateful for those you have in your life, building evidence for what you are doing right in your life, and setting achievable goals for both your personal and professional life.
Do you realize the power of a good morning routine? Your mornings can set you up for success, set you up to achieve your goals today, set you up to end the day feeling accomplished, OR they can actually work against you.
Your morning routine should reflect what season you are in right now. Spend some time really defining what major thing in your life you would like to work on. Often, we make the mistake of trying to change a bunch of things in our life that we think are making us unhappy. This just sets us up to fail because we take on changing too many things at the same time. Is this a season where you are stressed, lonely, unproductive, or lost focus? Answering this question will help you establish your morning routine that gets to work on being there for yourself in this season.
Your morning routine has to be just that, YOURS. I will give you strategies to begin to build your routine, but I want you to remember that we are all unique and not everything works for everyone. For each strategy ask yourself, will this work for me, for my personality? If yes, great. If no, tweak it to make it yours! Actually, this is the beauty in working with a life coach is that you set goals from the place of owning your innate strengths and weaknesses and then using them to go for your dreams.
It should be fluid. Don’t you hate it when you start something new, super positive that this will help you be in more control of your life only to find that it doesn’t work? The routine that I am leaning into right now took me over a year to build into. I chose what I wanted it to look like, came up with my routine, tried it for a week, and then assessed. What worked? What didn’t? Why? And then, I edited and began again. Don’t ever fall into the trap of creating something and then do it just to do it. Make it work for you! As you change and grow, your routine should grow with you.
How do you want to feel about yourself today? Strategy 1: Set your intention. What do I mean by that? It can be many things, a word, a feeling, a phrase, or a quote on a sticky note. I name a feeling, and sometimes I identify more than one. Then, I think through my day. What could make the day challenging? How do I feel right now in looking at my day? What am I looking forward to? What do I need for me to be successful?
I’ll give you an example, if this is a season where I want to focus on lowering my stress, then I might answer that my day might be challenging because I have a lot of meetings scheduled. My word of intention would then be engaged, or purposeful. Naming this word then reminds me of who and how I want to be throughout my day. Sometimes I put my word into my phone as an alarm for early afternoon to anchor the second part of my day with my morning intention.
Who do I want to connect with today? Strategy 2: Appreciate the people in your life. It often is easy to forget to be intentional and grateful for those that we have in our lives. As I take a moment to think through my answer to this question, it gives me time to practice gratitude for who I am blessed to have in my life. Also, I want to remind you that you can answer this question with “myself”. I do, often. If I am having a day where I am not feeling my best, or I am judging myself hard for something then answering “myself” gives me the ability to think “what do I need from me today?”. In connecting with myself, then I can begin to be who I need to be today for me.
What did you do amazing yesterday? Strategy 3: List 3 things you did right the day before. This practice challenges your brain to find evidence of what you did WELL! Our brains are conditioned to look to the negatives in life to protect us, to keep us safe. So, by listing 3 things you did right, you are giving equal air time in your brain to the good things that we all do each day. It also begins to build a body of evidence of how amazing you truly are. If this is a hard thing for you to do, then think of it this way. I tend to be a very encouraging mom, so I think, “what would I say to my son about how he chose to live his life yesterday?”. Putting it into third person just helps me somehow.
What are my goals for the day and WHY are they important to me? Strategy 4: List 3 personal and 3 professional goals for yourself. This gives you the ability to pare down your to do list to what is really important, reminds yourself of the weight of the why behind it, AND it allows you to feel accomplished at the end of the day.
There you go! Four strategies to help you craft a routine that works for you. You now have the tools to impact your day, so let’s get going! You got this, just start and do it perfectly imperfect! That is where we all start new things.
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