The 6 Morning Habits of High Performers
Create a better version of yourself
1. Silence
10 minutes of silence rejuvenates your creativity and provides clarity in thought. It helps in prioritizing the tasks for the day. You can try to meditate. You can use the timer on your phone to keep track of 10 minutes.
Your initial days of practicing silence is probably the worst with continuous stream of thoughts running through your mind.
Don’t self judge.
It only gets better with each day. Just focus on your breathing. You can practice pranayamam for 10 minutes
2. Make Truthful Affirmations
The affirmations you make to yourself must be realistic and truthful. By telling yourself daily that you are going to become a billionaire or you are going to get your dream job or you are going to complete the full marathon you always wished for, doesn’t really help. May be it just gives you temporary morale boost and pride, but it doesn’t yield results.
Craft your affirmations as commitments
Breakdown your commitments as sequence of steps
What are you committed to ?
Why is it important to you ?
What activities are you planning to do to achieve the commitment ?
When are you going to do these activities ?
“When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”
3. Use visualization to motivate yourself
If your commitment is to loose few pounds or buy your dream car/home, it give immense motivation to see yourself there. For example visualise yourself in front of the mirror as how you would like to see yourself. Imagine yourself living in your dream home or driving your dream car. With the visualization in mind, it’s had to slip on giving your best to achieve your commitment.
4. Boost your energy with morning exercise
The benefits of exercise are innumerable but it’s effects quadraple when done in the morning. Exercise produces Endorphins , commonly called as the happy hormones. Starting your day on a positive and happy note prepares you to face the challenges of the day and win through them.
We all are chasing time everyday. Even a 7 minute intense cardio exercise is enough to lighten up rest of your day
5 Read a few pages each day
We are in a world where you have abundant information on any topic you desire. Reading calms your mind and there is absolutely nothing stopping you from exceling in the field you desire. Reading a few pages makes you a better person than what you were the previous day.
I personally prefer hard copy of books, while digital content too does no harm as long as you are comfortable.
6 Clarifying your priority with a Journal
Often there too many things running in our mind, which just blanks your mind out. Lack of clarity in thought is the first step to failure. Putting your thoughts to writting declutters your mind. Be it a worry or anxiety or your to do list, Put it to writting and you would realise, you have lot more clarity than you had before writting it down.
There are multiple tools and apps for journalling. I personally prefer the old school method of using a paper and pen. It helps to struture your journal, there by making it quick and easy. Every day you can categorize it into 2 parts
3 things I am grateful for (Being alive and healthy in itself it something you can be grateful for :-) )
3 things I am going to do to improve myself.
One of the popular guideline is The Five minute Journal
Appreciate your current place in the journey
It’s never too late to bring a positive change in your life. If you look back, you could count immense progress you made in the last few years and everything has happened for a reason and the reason is for good. You are just 1 step away from getting better than what you are today.
Have a healthy sense of urgency helps but not remorse.