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Good Morning! Good Life!

if you want more time for the things that you love in life, you've got to start the day on your terms. We often hear about successful people and the amazing things that they do in the morning that helped them to lead productive lifestyles. Natural instinct would be to try such tactics for yourself to see if they equate to the same success. And then ultimately, when we can't keep up with what was never really right for us to begin with, we decide morning routines aren't for us either, but all along the most important thing is that you indeed start the day on your terms, meaning doing something that gives you the power to go through the rest of your day with your best foot forward when you do things that are right for you to start the day that can happen. And that is what I believe and why I wrote the book Good Morning Good Life and why I wanted to squash all of these misconceptions about what a great morning routine looks like. It's not the exact steps that you must take. Its the bucket...

s that you fill and the fuel that you find for yourself. So in this lesson I'd like to share the Good Morning Good Life method with you so that you can figure out what does an effective morning routine look like for you. So it's not just another task or chore on your list, but actually something that propels you into a productive day in helping you plan your perfect morning routine. I would like to show you with the Good Morning Good Life 12 month planner. It's the perfect partner if you have read Good Morning Good Life or if you are watching this lesson, but if you don't have the planner, don't worry. Look for the worksheet so that you can go through the exercises and figure out what your best start looks like. So what's the big deal with a morning routine? Well, it has everything to do with the assumption of time. When we assume we have time to get what we need to do done, we take time for granted. And this is why it is so important to not just have a plan for our work but have a plan for how we will start our day and how we will end our day, which helps us start the day on our terms. This leads me to talk to you about the biggest morning missteps that we see that keeps us from starting today on our terms, that keeps us from having an effective morning routine. That actually makes us feel better about our day. The first being lack of sleep. It is no secret to anyone how important sleep is. We love it when we can get it and yet we can never get enough of it. And it has a lot to do with not planning accordingly. Now of course there are those who have real sleep challenges and some of which can't just be solved with a couple of life hacks. But across the board the hours, the minutes, the critical time that we can't add on to our sleep time has a lot to do with the circumstances surrounding that time. What we do before bed, what we do when we wake up, what time we wake up and how all of those things work together. So getting enough sleep is vital. Making sure that you're doing everything you can to get enough sleep is the best that you can do. So even if there are real sleep challenges, what are you doing to at least give yourself the best case scenario. And that leads me to the second morning this step which is sleeping with your significant other? No, no, not him. Your smartphone. It may seem obvious my smartphone is my alarm clock. So it's gotta be right there next to me. So it'll wake me up every day. But what ultimately happens, I'm sure you're very familiar is you touch your smartphone first thing in the morning, you shut your alarm off. If you don't snooze and go back to sleep, you pick up your phone and you start to engage what is happening in the world today. You are ultimately consuming what the world wants you to think before you've even had your own original thought, This is a fantastic way to start the day on everyone else's terms, whether you're checking social media or email or texts or absolutely anything that that device has to offer you. If you're hoping to have an effective morning routine, I can guarantee you it has nothing to do with what the rest of the world expects of you already. So not sleeping with your smartphone is one big step that you can take to starting the day on your terms and the third biggest morning misstep is waking up earlier. Best of intentions to have an amazing morning routine today. But doing it without a plan again, all you've done is give yourself more time in the day to make unnecessary decisions without the plan, your wandering aimlessly of what am I gonna do? Should I fall back asleep? Because I don't really know what I should do next or what could I have in my life at this moment? That would make me feel more powerful and more empowered to go into the rest of my day. I don't want you to have to think and make that decision when you still got to sleep in your eyes and you're just remembering how to walk since yesterday. So we're gonna help you with these big morning missteps with the Good Morning Good Life method. Starting with reverse engineering your wake up time and your sleep time. You're probably asking why do you need to tell me what time I'm going to sleep while based on the missteps, we've got to make sure we're getting enough sleep. So knowing what time you want to wake up in the morning is great. But not if you didn't get 7-8 hours of sleep, it completely defeats the purpose of waking up starting the day on your terms. If you can't even start well rested. So to do this, we're going to use the timeline map. My recommendation is that you start with the first appointment of your day. For most of us it's going to be a rough starting time for our work which is clocking in let's say at nine a.m. By knowing that this is the moment that we need to start reporting to the rest of the world. We can start to figure out how much time we have for our own terms and we can work backwards to figure out. Okay well what are some of the things that I want to do? How much time do I need for that and then therefore what time do I need to wake up in order for that to happen? We're gonna unpack some of the things that you can do during your morning routine to start your day on your terms. But assume you need to give yourself a little bit of time here and figure out how much time you need by. Also, including how much time do you need to get ready for work? How much time do you need to commute? If that's the case in this situation working from home, you won't have to add your commute unless you've got some other things happening that you need to include. Everyone's situation is different. You get the opportunity to outline what a typical day looks like here, knowing how much time you need to get ready, what you would like to be able to give yourself for just the morning routine time, whether it's an hour, I recommend at least 60 minutes for yourself. But if you can only get 30 minutes, that's okay. Whatever you can do, especially when you don't often have to commute to a job is awesome. But now we know planning on all of that stuff, what time you need to wake up and that wake up time is going to indicate to you what your fall asleep time is. Now notice I didn't say you're go to bed time. I said your fall asleep time. Because if we need 7 to 8 hours of sleep for a lot of people, that doesn't mean 7 to 8 hours in bed. It actually means a little bit longer than that to be in bed because we've got to give ourselves the circumstance and time and mood until to be able to fall asleep. So if we have to fall asleep by a certain time to get 7 to 8 hours of sleep, then reverse engineering. Well, what time should we get into bed? Do we want to get into bed without the phone and maybe with a book? So well actually encourage our body to fall asleep naturally. What time should that take place and then you can go on to reverse engineer the rest of your evening. How much stuff do you need to get done? When should dinner be over? How much T. V. Time can you have social media scroll time so that you will go to bed on time and fall asleep to set yourself up for the next day. This is what the timeline map is here to help you do. And again it's completely custom to your situation. The key thing being you got to sit down and figure out what your life looks like in your situation, whether you're also taking care of people around you in the evenings and how that comes into play or you have other people in your space in the mornings and how that comes into play. What does your timeline look like when you at least give it a plan? This is never going to be perfect, but at least you know what you're doing when you set your alarm for that time and why you would actually get up instead of hitting snooze. Now let's talk about what you're going to do during that, you time during that morning routine time. This is what we want to figure out for you to truly be starting a day on your terms because getting ready for work, commuting to work or just sitting down at your desk, opening up your laptop and ready set go is not your day on your terms, it's a part of your work. What is just for you when you start the day? The Good morning Good Life method includes three good morning moments and if you do something that fits the bill in each of these buckets, you will have had a very productive, very healthy start to your day and certainly one that is on your terms, the first bucket is movement. A lot of people love to work out in the morning and so maybe that's something you already do and you can already check this off your morning routine list, whether it's a treadmill thing or running outside thing or you go to the gym, all of these things take different spaces of time, so it's just about planning that time accordingly. But checking off that movement bucket is a great start to your day. We know we get more energy from exercising, we know we get more energy when we get that out of the way and not have to worry about it in the evening when our body and mind are tired, I'm not really a workout first thing in the morning type of gal. I like to work out closer to lunchtime but my movement could be some other things like stretching. I like to move the muscles on my face through some skin care, Get the crust is out of my eyes. Just walking to the coffee pot tends to be pretty good movement for me to make sure that I'm starting the day slowly calmly and totally on my terms. So you choose whatever movement makes sense for you. The second bucket is mindfulness. What are you doing to just encourage yourself to feel and have an original thought first thing in the morning, one of my favorite things to do is called morning pages. It is stream of consciousness, write it all down stuff for three pages and any grudges or weird dreams that I had or things that happened yesterday that I need to let go of can just flow onto the page and help me move on to a more creative state. I learned about this in Julia Cameron's book, the artist's way and it's an amazing idea but your idea of mindfulness could be meditation, it could be a gratitude journal, it could be really anything visualization, it could be reading anything that gives you that mindful moment to start the day instead of what we typically do and look for the urgencies and emergencies and bad news of the day, which we know we're going to find on our phones. Can we at least know how we feel before we let the rest of the world try to come into that equation and the final bucket. And this is one that I love the most because it's what changed the game for me when I was transitioning into a full time entrepreneur and that is mastery, Mastery is your time for that stuff that you wish you were getting around to. Do. You wish you knew uh, foreign language or do you wish you'd been practicing the piano or have you not been working on your side hustle as much as you could because the evening's gets so hectic and busy and your family needs you. What can you do during your mastery time in the morning to feel like you moved one of your own personal goals, one of your passions, one of your desires forward by far and away. One of the biggest game changing buckets of a morning routine. And then when you have to check out from your passion and maybe move into the things you have to do for the day, you can feel so much better knowing that you at least spent a little bit of time moving it forward, just a little bit more so that it's more and more and more possible. Something else to keep in mind. Your morning routine might need a space as well. I don't do my morning routine at my work desk because again it's work mode for me. I have a special space where I do my movement, my mindfulness and my mastery. So remember that when you are making this decision and making this plan, part of it is knowing where to go, like we talked about before. So nowhere to go choose that space and do your morning routine every day. It's not going to prove effective unless it's right for you and you actually keep up with it and you can't keep up with it unless it's right for you. And that's the Good Morning good Life method. It's very simple and it's very customizable. So here's what we know now we're going to avoid those morning mistakes. We're gonna get 7 to 8 hours of sleep every night, avoid consumption of media first thing in the morning, at least not when we first open our eyes and avoid too much decision making. That would cause a morning routine to be more of a hindrance than a help. Then we're going to reverse engineer our sleep and wake up times and fill those three morning routine buckets during the morning routine, time, movement, mindfulness and mastery Next up in order to make all things possible, especially a day that starts on your terms. We're going to talk about the five habits for effective work from home communication.