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In this episode we talk about why it’s important to have a morning ritual. What a morning ritual really is and what it isn’t (It doesn’t mean you have to kill yourself getting up crazy early on the first day!)
We talk about the components that could go in the a morning routine for you and how to create one with a ‘menu’ of ideas.
Inside the lab, we Deep Dive into an EVENING routine and how this is the thing that can make all the difference for you to have success in the morning!
Join the lab by heading to www.livebiglab.com.
music by bensound. com
Transcript:
Hi, I’m Betsy Pake. I’m a reinvention strategist and NLP coach, author and speaker. But really, I feel like I just work with people all over the country to help them be happier. And to help them have a little bit more ease in their life. Today, I hope to do the same for you. Thanks for listening. Now, let’s go live. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the show. I am Betsy Pake, and I’m here today to talk with you about morning and evening rituals that will set you up for success. Now, this is a practice that I started probably about four years ago. And it really had an incredible impact. Having that structure for my mornings really made a huge impact on how I went forward in my day, and how I actually became the person who could do the things that I wanted to do. I’m going to explain all that. And I’m going to let you in on some really great tips and some tips to set up your evening routine. Now. I totally believe that the morning routine success starts in the evening. That’s going to be inside the lab. So if you want some information about the lab, you can text live big one word 2444999. Or you can just go to live big lab.com. All right, we got that out of the way. All right. So let’s get into it. When my daughter was in elementary school, so she is a sophomore in high school now. But when she was in elementary school, things were hectic. I was a single mom, I had to get up really early, get her ready, get myself ready for work. Gosh, I remember those days driving to a daycare, bringing her to a daycare in the morning, the daycare fed her breakfast, and brought her to school, picked her up from school. And then I picked her up from daycare at like six or 630 at night. It was such a rough time looking back, I just felt so lost. And in the mornings, they were just hectic, right? I mean it there is it just felt like there was no way to get a handle and have things run smoothly. Boy, if I knew then what I know now.
But the reality
is that my life wouldn’t be different right now,
if
I hadn’t made the changes and started to implement that program that morning routine when I did. So I want to share with you a little bit about my morning routine, some morning routines of some other people that might really help you and just some ideas to kind of help you get in the flow. And to help you think through how you could set your mornings up so that your whole day went smoother. Now you might be thinking like what’s the big deal morning routine, like so what you had a hectic morning, like that sounds hectic, I get it. But the reality is, is that how we start our day really sets the tone for every other part of our day. And so if we start the day feeling behind, if we start the day, feeling frazzled, that’s the energy that we have going into our day at work. It’s the energy we have going into our day with our friends, it’s the energy that we have, that’s really starting to hold us back. So this feeling of like, I can’t get ahead, I’m always behind, everything’s always so hectic. You know, I’m not in control. And one thing that I know is that when we feel in control is when we can feel really happy. And so a way to get control of our days is to get control of our mornings. All right. So when we start thinking about a morning routine, I know many people are like, Oh my gosh, I need to sleep. I totally get it. And you’ve probably heard stuff about morning routines. And you think like I’m not getting up an hour early. Or I’m not getting up, you know, an hour and a half early to do whatever people do on their morning routines. And I want to just address that before we even dive into what you would do on a morning routine. Because I think many times we think, you know, just like the whole start small live big thing, right? So many times we think like, I got to go big, like I got to immediately jump into getting up an hour early. And honestly, if your life is already hectic and your life is already really busy, then that can really throw you off. And that’s not what we want a morning routine to do. And so as we go through, and we talk about all the different areas and different things you could do to create a morning routine that’s specific for you just know that you can create something that is an hour long routine. But you start with 10 minutes. You start with 15 minutes, and you get up 15 minutes early and you do a few
of the things
or you do an abbreviated version of the things. And then the next week you get up 25 minutes early, and then the next week 30 minutes early. So Know that this isn’t a process that you just have to dive into, you can work your body up into it. The other thing is when you’re thinking about sleep, and if you’re automatically going like, I cannot get up early, I want you to really think about your bedtime. Now, you might be a night owl, like, I totally get that sometimes I get this, like surge of energy at night and creative energy. And I want to start, you know, making lists and mapping out my plans, you know, of taking over the world. But there is a moment where I have to think to myself, like, what am I doing right now? Is it benefiting me? Is it truly benefiting me. And if you don’t have a vision right now, then I’ll put a link to a blog post where you can actually download a workbook and get clear on your vision. Because that’s how you can start making decisions for what you want to do and what you don’t want to do what you say yes to and what you say no to. So at night, if I feel this, like energy, I say does it align with my vision is helping me towards my vision, if it’s watching TV mindlessly, if it’s watching the Kardashians, which is my secret, guilty pleasure, then that’s not really aligned with who I want to be right, it’s not really bringing me into the goals and helping me reach the things I want to reach. So that’s where I can go, you know what I’m going to go to bed. And so I want to start getting up early, because I want to start having the time to do the things that would be in a great morning routine to set my day up. And I’m willing to sacrifice watching an hour of mindless TV so that I can become the kind of person who reaches the goals I want to reach. Okay, so this is really all about, like decisions and choices in your life, which it always is. But so think through as if you if your immediate thought is, oh my gosh, I can’t do a morning routine, I’d have to get up early and I love to sleep, then think about your evening routine. And again, we’re going to talk more about that inside the lab. But that would be an easy way for you to just eliminate some mindlessness and really start moving towards getting up a little bit earlier so that you have time to set your day up. Okay. All right. So why do we even do this? Like, why would we need a morning routine like so what things are hectic, you may be like I was where I’m racing around getting my kid to daycare, like just trying to get to work on time. I mean, I remember those days, I drink a Red Bull on my way to the Starbucks, okay, like, I was just just trying to keep it together and move forward.
And so the reason that
we do this is because it can set up our day better. And also we can become the kind of person who does the kinds of things that you want to do in that vision for yourself and for your future that you’ve set up. So you may have some really big lofty goals. Well, how do I get there, you have to have time to do the things I’m going to talk about in order to get there. So so important. And so setting it up in the morning is actually when our willpower is at its highest is in the morning, if you push these things off to evening, is there a chance you won’t do them? Absolutely a much greater chance. And so, you know, try it in the morning, see how that works. It sets the tone for your day, you become the kind of person who does and your willpower is high. Right? So now we’re gonna get into kind of a shift in how I’m feeling in control of my day, and how my level of mindfulness goes up, which is all increasing our happiness. When we’re happier, our energy is higher, we’re moving towards our goals faster. Okay. All right. So now what do we do? So now we’re up 10 minutes early. We’re up 15 minutes early, ideally, like we’ve given ourselves an hour to grow in the morning. What do I do? Well, I’ve got lots of ideas. I have perfected my own routine, and I’ve tried different things. And you’ve probably heard people talk about morning routines. I mean, I think since how l rods book, The Miracle Morning came out. I don’t
remember when that came out maybe three or four years ago.
But that’s really when I felt like I saw more people talking about it. But then
it started coming out that like
high high level CEOs have been doing this for years and years. Right. Margaret? Margaret Thatcher talks about how she has a distinct morning routine. I mean, even Ben Franklin talked about how he set up his morning he had like, have you I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that little picture like where it’s like his handwriting or
whatever.
Like how he set up his morning, and what good shall I do today was the question he asked himself. And if you don’t have an intention for your morning, and you’re racing and you’re drinking your Redbull on the way to Starbucks, like just barely getting your kid off. Everybody’s crying. I mean, I’m just saying that’s possible, because I might know somebody that that happened to
then what kind of
data do you expect to have? Do you expect things to come down? Do you expect things to feel in control when you started that way? All right. So now let’s get into the real nitty gritty of what we’re actually doing in the morning. So my very first tip
is no snooze button. I know
you’re like I, I have actually, I’m going to I am going to tell a true story. My daughter decided over the summer, she wanted to get up early, like she didn’t want to waste her summer away by sleeping. And so she set an alarm. And I was watching her do it on her iPhone. And she said, like, 17 I’m not even joking, like 17 different alarms. I said, Why are you doing that? And she said, cuz I want to sleep, which I guess she didn’t know the about a snooze button is my guess. But she set up all these different alarms that were like an hour. So it was like every five minutes for and I was like, okay, no, like, the very first thing you need to do is take your phone and shut off the snooze option. It’s not an option. When the alarm goes off, you get out of bed. And when your brain knows you don’t have the snooze option, then you don’t have an option to press snooze, and keep sleeping. You’re training your brain, to hold yourself accountable to keep promises to yourself. Now again, if you can only do this five minutes before you’d usually get up. Maybe for a week, you actually just do that maybe for a week, you just get up when your alarm gets off. Right when your alarm goes off instead of pressing snooze. If you are a big time snoozer, but this if you do nothing else, I think this is so important. So stop pressing snooze, hold yourself accountable, get up when the alarm goes off. All right. The next thing is a tip that I have found to work for me. It’s really amazing. It’s sometimes difficult, but I think it can make a profound impact. And that is, when I start my morning routine, my alarm goes off my phone is on airplane mode when I go to bed. And I keep it on airplane mode until after my morning routine is completed. Okay, so I don’t turn my phone on, I’ve got my phone because
I use it for
my alarm. But I don’t turn on the internet. And the reason for that is because you become a robot, the moment you turn on the internet on that phone, right? So you go down the rabbit hole of like, I’m just going to quick check Facebook, right I’m gonna just quick see what’s going on on Instagram, all of that stuff, you know, is programmed to work the way your brain works, which is to get you hooked in. So now you’ve,
you’ve made this
amazing commitment to yourself, you’ve set the alarm, you’ve gotten right up, and then you dive into social media now 20 minutes have gone by and you’ve wasted, you’ve wasted that time where you could really be growing and learning. So there will be time to jump into that later. Just for now keep your phone off. The next thing is you know, and sometimes I talk to people and they’re like, I really like drinking water in the morning or I really like coffee in the morning, I really, that time can be part of your morning routine. You know, I really love bulletproof coffee in the morning, and I use a French press, my phone is off, I get up, I feed my animals, I open up the coffee, I can smell the aroma of the coffee. And I use a French press and it’s a process I boil the water I can hear the water boiling in the teapot. I put the coffee in the French press, you know I let it sit for 30 seconds with just a little bit of water in there. So that you know if all the gases come out of the coffee. I mean, I’ve made it into a ritual. And what rituals can do is make us mindful they can bring us back to the present moment. And when we’re in the present moment, we’re able to make decisions much clearer. We’re able to appreciate where we are, we’re able to find more joy and happiness and really isn’t that what you want for
your morning
routine. You don’t want the chaotic kid screaming racing out the door with a sugar free Red Bull right you want this calm moment Now
this doesn’t have to take very long
I
I boil the water feed my dogs the waters boiled by the time I’m done feeding my dogs, the whole coffee process I time and it takes four minutes. So this is not a long time. But in the time that that’s happening, I use a go to my next thing of my morning routine. So I’ve got my coffee. It’s it is percolating or brewing is not a percolator. It’s a French press, it is cooking. And I just go into gratitude. So I have four minutes of just saying all the stuff I appreciate about my life. Now what this is doing is training my brain to look for things that are great about my life and things I appreciate. And it’s also helping me to like feel really good and be happy. There’s a quote that I heard Bernie brown say once in it, it goes like this, it goes, it is not happy people who are grateful, it’s grateful people who are happy. So use that time, if you get your water or you make tea, or whatever it is for you use that time and get into full on gratitude, it can be this. In fact, my most favorite things to be grateful for are the little bitty things. Like, I’m grateful that this coffee smells so good that I have the sense of smell that I have, like this French press that I can make this specific kind of coffee that I want. And this mug I love this month, like it can be the smallest of things. And that’s really, I think, which makes you feel the most full. It’s not the great big things in life, it’s those really, really small things. Alright, then, what I’m going to do is I’m going to give you options, there’s going to be a list of these in the lab. And you can choose and pick and choose right. So use it like a menu of how you want
to create your morning routine.
If you have an hour, spend 10 minutes on each thing, and fill up your hour with the things that work for you. So the next thing is to learn something now, if you are building, trying to grow right building something new in your life, you’re an entrepreneur, or you’re trying to get ahead in your career, or you want better relationships, it really doesn’t matter. But choose something in that area to learn something new. So find a book that you’ve been wanting to read in that area and spend 10 minutes reading something new, I tend to read during that time with a highlighter so that I can go back and notice things and bring those up into my life during the day so that I can remember the things I’ve learned and try to work them into my life. Because it’s really about taking action on the things that we’ve learned. The next thing is exercise. Now, this may be something that you do first thing in the morning, it may be something that you do later in the day. So but I would just encourage you in the morning routine, just to have some time where you’re stretching, you know, where you’re, you’re maybe doing some yoga poses or just stretching, just move your body a little bit, you know, that could be five or 10 minutes, just something so that you’re starting to feel the blood pumping right in your system. So again, you can do these in whatever order works for you pick and choose like a menu. The next thing is to get into meditation. Now, you know, I’m a big huge fan of meditation, I feel like this has a huge impact on my life. And you can do if right now you’re like, I’m not a meditator, you can do meditation in so many different ways. It doesn’t have to be what you think I use an app called m vahana, for daily meditations. And there’s a really great one by vision, Laconia, it’s free in there, it’s called the six phase meditation, it’s 20 minutes long, and it goes through like forgiveness, you know, feeling your consciousness expanding, like all of these things to sort of touch on different areas that you would want in a meditation. There’s a really great abundance, one by Bob Proctor that I have used for years, and I love it. But one of my most favorite things to do now is just to turn on ocean sounds, because that aligns with my vision of wanting to be near the water. And I just use that time to like, just to think to visualize, to have that moment where I’m just like being so I don’t have to be actively thinking anything, I can just be thinking about my breath, bringing it back, you know, I like to imagine there are a lot of light inside of me and the light kind of coming out the top of my head and all the way down through and out my tailbone, you know, so I can feel this light. And sometimes I imagine the light growing in a circle around me and encompassing everybody in my home, encompassing everyone in my neighborhood in my city, you know, so whatever kind of let brings you back to center and gives you that mindfulness in the morning. meditation can be huge. Now. I think people are getting more turned on to meditation. But I will tell you that so many, so many CEOs talk about meditation, big CEOs, that this is something that’s really made an impact on their life. And I heard I think it was Andy Dooley once talking and he had a great analogy. He was like if Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, Oprah made a pill that you could become whatever you wanted, and you would you take that pill, that pill is meditation. And so you know, if you haven’t done that, if you haven’t added that into your morning routine, something to consider, right, try it out, see if it works for you. The next thing is writing or journaling. Now I use an app called day one, it’s on my Mac, I
opened on my Mac
and I get just
writing out what I’m feeling that morning. Sometimes I write poems, which if you’re listening to this, and you know me, you’re like you write poems, right? So it’s not something I share. But it’s a way for me to be creative and express how I’m feeling with that. app, you can actually upload pictures so you could it locates like where you are. So when I’m traveling, it’s fun to look back. You know, sometimes I look back where it was a year ago, wow. Like, that’s when you can really kind of look over your shoulder and see how far you’ve come, you know, based on what your thoughts were what you were feeling that morning. So writing and journaling can be such a big, huge impact on your morning. The last thing that I’ll talk about is incantations. Now, in Episode 52, we talked about affirmations, we talked about releasing the emergency brake on your life. And since I recorded that episode, I saw Tony Robbins live. And he talked about how he does his visualizations, and affirmations, I’m sorry, and really what he does is he changes your state. So, you know, you’ve probably heard me talk about that before. Changing your state, changing how your body is, can directly affect your mind and your brain, right. So if you really want to get affirmations, and you want them to become part of who you are, get really excited, change your state, change your body, change what you’re doing. And so what I’ve started doing is dance party. So in the morning, I turn on music that pumps me
up.
And I do this as my last thing before I go get ready for my morning so that it works for me. So I turn on some music that really makes me feel pumped up. And then I put my hands in the air that’s right above my head, because that changes my physiology, it actually changes the way my brain working. And I jump up and down and I dance around. And I think and I visualize what my future is, we spend a hell a lot of time thinking about our past, replaying crap, that’s already happened, because that’s what our brain knows. So we have to feed it new stuff. And our brain really likes it when we do that. And it likes it even more when we do it. And we’re adding emotion. That’s what makes it stick. Since I started doing this, I noticed when I start to replay something from the past, I noticed it which I didn’t notice before, and my brain immediately goes to something that I dance party about. So this can really be incredible. Now, I don’t do it in front of anybody, I’ve done it in front of my daughter, she thinks I’m nuts already. So it didn’t really matter. Honest to God, I’m really close with my husband, but I don’t know how I’d feel about him seeing me, because I really, like that’s how and I tell you that only to say like, that’s how much of a fool I act, because that’s what really gets me in the moment and gets me in that emotion. And, and you know, you, you remember things so much clearer when you’re in a really high state of emotion. I mean, think about times where, like something tragic has happened. I mean, I can look back on, you know, some tragedy in my life. And I actually remember what I was wearing, you know, so, like, you probably remember where you were when you learned about 911. Like, you know, all of those things are, are stuck in your brain because the emotion was high. So get the emotion high, and start to visualize and give yourself the affirmations for what’s to come. Alright, if you want to know how to set up certain triggers, you know, you want to change your habits, you need new triggers and new associations, so that you don’t forget to drink your water in the morning or you don’t forget to do stuff. I mean, make a list for your morning routine. That’s how I did it. And then I could make sure I hit all the things I wanted to hit. But you can go into episode number 27. And I actually talk about how to anchor new things, develop new habits, and that might really help you to as you start to plan out your morning routine. Now, no great morning routine starts without an excellent evening routine. And inside the lab, I’m going to go into how to describe and how to create a more of an evening routine that supports your morning that way you are like dang near guaranteed success. And you’ll feel so much better and so much more in control. So join me in the lab you can get there again by going to live big lab.com or you can just text live big one word 2444999. You can join in on that community, get in on the Facebook group and start to communicate and talk with people about what they’re doing, and how it’s working for them. So thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Art of Living big And don’t forget, you deserve to live a big life. Can’t wait to hear how this works for you. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now don’t forget you can find the lab by going to live big lab.com or you can text the word live big just one word 2444999. Have a super week. And as always, here’s the little message from my husband.
That’s it.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
