How to Build a Morning Routine
One of ways you can strengthen your workday mindset and show up at your best for everyone around you is to start your day with a routine that prioritizes you first.
Episode Transcription
Intro:
One of ways you can strengthen your workday mindset and show up at your best for everyone around you is to start your day with a routine that prioritizes you first. Let’s talk about how to create one. Here we go.
Main:
In the last episode we talked about why it’s important to start the day focused on you. And we said that It’s very easy for us to think that the best way to help the people around us is to move through our day always putting others first.
But if you really want to show up at your best for everyone in your life, and if you want to be the best version of yourself, then you should consider looking for ways to start everyday doing something that’s focused on you.
Getting used to the idea of focusing on yourself first can be a challenge because it feels selfish and might make us feel like by starting the day doing something other than work or serving others, that we’re sort of falling behind.
But it turns out that the people around you not only want you to do it, they’re counting on you to do it. People don’t want you to show up for them in a poor mindset, or feeling tired, or feeling overworked, or stressed. They want and need you at your best.
So at the end of the last episode we talked about how you can start the process of flipping from being others focused to focusing on ourselves first thing in the morning.
And we said that if you want to start putting this into practice and if you want to start shifting your perception, the first thing you need to do is figure out what it is that helps you show up at your best.
You’re not going to be able to put together a strong morning routine unless you figure that part out first.
And I ended the last episode by challenging you to get out the biggest blankest sheet of paper you can find and just freewriting answers to these four questions:
1. What helps me show up at my best?
2. What brings me clarity?
3. What helps me take care of my mind, body, my soul?
4. What makes me happy?
If you haven’t done that yet I would encourage you to head to the last episode and listen to that one first.
But today, building on that, I want to walk you through three things. First, I want to show you how to build a simple morning routine that prioritizes you and that will help you show up at your best.
second, I want to give you a glimpse into my morning routine so that you have an example of how to start putting this into practice.j
And then third, I want to give you some suggestions for how to make your morning routine work for you.
So first: how do you build a simple routine? There are lots of resources out there on how to build routines, lots of books and other podcast episodes on this - but I think the challenge with a lot of those resources is that they don’t talk enough about how hard it is for our bodies and our minds to implement new routines, especially first thing in the morning.
Our brains love habits, and so even if you’re motivated to change the way your morning goes it can still be very hard to make those changes - and its especially hard to make a lot of changes all at once.
So the way I’m going to lay this out for you is I want to give you a roadmap for how you can start this process incrementally. When it comes to new routines and habits I love the idea of making incremental changes because it allows you to experience small wins along the way which help incentive repetition of your new routine. And I’ll show you what I mean by that here in a second.
Here’s how I want to break this up for you: I want to outline 4 steps in this process. And if you follow this process step by step, you’re going to start to see the kind of changes you want in your morning.
Ok here we go: Step 1: is to explore what helps you show up at your best. If you’ve done the work of answering the four questions I posed earlier, then you’re already well on your way on this step. But I”m going to mention them one more time here.
The questions are:
1. What helps me show up at my best?
2. What brings me clarity?
3. What helps me take care of my mind, body, my soul?
4. What makes me happy?
So step one is to just do some exploring into what kinds of things you want to do to start your day.
Step 2: Take this list and pick one thing from it. Just one thing. Not four, not three, not two - just one thing.
I promise you that you’ll be able to expand your routine eventually, but I want you to exercise some patience here and just pick one thing to start.
Now I personally think an ideal morning routine includes things that help you address your mind, your body and your soul - but it’s really up to you to pick things that will help you show up at your best each day.
So the one thing will be different for every person, but some examples might include things like:
Reading something that’s personal development related or maybe something you read just for pleasure
A few minutes of meditation or quiet time
Doing something for your body - a quick walk, a run, exercising for a few minutes, doing some mobility work or something else that’s active
Pulling out a journal and writing for five minutes about anything you want to write about
Or maybe it’s just quiet time - having your coffee or your tea and just sitting there and thinking about whatever you want to think about for a few minutes before the day gets going.
If you REALLY think about this, I think you’ll know what the best place is to start for you. But remember - we’re just picking one thing.
Just so we have an example we can work with, let’s say that reading something personal development related is the one thing you’ve chosen to do to start the morning, so let’ s just use this example as we move through these steps.
Step 3: Is to Identify a trigger and a time frame
So if you look at the science on routine and habit formation, one of the ways we begin a routine is by having a trigger that alerts our brain that it’s time to engage in a routine.
Triggers can be things like a time of day, an action or event that happens, or entering a certain space that causes the routine to start.
A couple of examples of triggers during your morning might be:
When you alarm clock goes off
Pouring yourself a cup of coffee
Sitting down in your favorite chair
Stepping outside
Putting on your running shoes
It could be anything that signals to your brain that you’re about to engage in your morning routine.
In our example, let’s say that the trigger for me reading something personal development related is that I pour a cup of coffee and go sit in my favorite chair outside. If I do this over and over, then my brain automatically starts to know that in the morning when I go pour a cup of coffee and head straight to my chair, the next thing that’s coming is me pulling out something to read.
As you’re starting out, I would also encourage you to set a manageable time frame - something that will give you enough time to benefit from the routine but that also will allow you to adjust incrementally to it.
So maybe you say your initial goal is to read for just 10 minutes. If you have more time and you go over, great - hang out and stay longer, but start with something that you’ll know you can do every morning as a starting point.
So if we were to sum up our routine, it would be something like this: after I pour a cup of coffee, I’m going to head to my favorite chair and read something personal development related for 10 minutes. That’s it.
And then Step 4 is to Do, Refine and build. Don’t spend too much time overthinking this. What we want to do is get you practicing doing this one thing right away so that you can start to create this new experience for yourself.
So tomorrow morning, now that you’ve picked your one thing, and now that you’ve picked your trigger and your time frame, then you just go do it.
And as you go through the process of doing this over and over each morning, I want you to think of this as a series of mini tests. You might know right away that this one thing that you’ve picked is what you need.
Or you might need to switch it up to figure out what the best things are for you to do in the morning. The point is that you shouldn’t feel any pressure as you do this. Treat it like a bunch of mini experiments and be curious about how you feel each time you do the routine.
And then once you’ve gotten comfortable with the process, then I think it’s ok to start putting a second or a third thing in - following the same flow I just laid out. In other words, identify a second thing, add it to your routine, and start small by giving yourself a time frame.
The key is to just pay attention to how the routine is making you feel, and making sure you’re starting small each time.
If you follow that simple framework, you’re going to notice a shift over the coming days and weeks - so be patient with it and know that it will take time for the new routine to latch on.
The second thing I wanted to do is give you a glimpse into my morning routine, just so you have another example of how you might build up your own routine over time.
I’ve been practicing my morning routine for years now, and it has changed a lot over the years - and I’ve wanted it to change because what I need to show up at my best each day shifts over time. So the point is never to just demonstrate how much discipline you have in following your routine - the point is to have a routine where you’re constantly getting something out of it.
So for me, when I made my list of the things that help me show up at my best, I realized that there were three categories I wanted to have as part of my routine: something that addressed my mind, something that addressed my body, and something that addressed my soul.
So each morning I go through a routine that looks something like this:
I’m up at 5:30 most mornings, and the first thing I do when I get out of bed is get a cold glass of water. Your body really gets dehydrated overnight and so I start with that.
Then I pour myself a cup of coffee and I head up onto my rooftop. Now I’m really fortunate that I currently live in an apartment in San Francisco that has rooftop access and a pretty awesome view of the Golden Gate Bridge - which is a tough life, I know.
But I head up there and I spend the first ten minutes reading something personal development related. For me, the NUMBER ONE thing that helps me show up at my best is a well-adjusted mindset that has me focusing on things that get me excited about my day and about the goals that I have for the future.
When I do this, I’m telling you I feel like I’m shot out of a cannon, it just puts me in the absolute best frame of mind because it helps me envision things that I get excited about working on and excited about achieving in my personal and professional life.
So over the years the books that have helped me do that are books like The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles, The Master Key System by Charles Haanel, The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale, As a Man Thinketh by James Allen, The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz, and Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.
If you’re interested in learning more about that list you can head to my resources page at drewamoroso.com and check them out there, but these have just been so instrumental each day in allowing me to start the day in the right mindset.
Once I’ve done that, then I’ll do a little bit of journaling - maybe 5 minutes just to get my creative juices flowing. I have some of my best ideas about my business and things I want to share with all of you first thing in the morning when I’m fresh, so I try to take advantage of that.
After that I’ll meditate for about 20 minutes. When I tried mediation for the first time years ago, I couldn’t even do it for three minutes. It was PAINFUL. I was so distracted and it was really hard.
But I had read so many good things about the power of meditation that I wanted to stick with it and give it a try, and I can tell you that the time I’ve spent doing it over the years has been absolutely instrumental for me.
I’m not going to spend any time on the benefits of it here on this episode, but I want to encourage you to try it if you haven’t yet. And know that you can just start with 3 minutes a day and build from there - even that amount of time can be impactful.
The last thing I do is something that’s movement related. Some morning I’ll go on a 20 minute run and jump in the Bay and go for a quick swim to finish it off, some mornings I’ll actually do a full workout or yoga, or some mornings I’ll just do some movement and mobility work for 10 minutes, it really just depends on how I’m feeling that day. My goal is to wake my body up with some movement.
So that’s my routine now, but over the years I’ve done other things that help me show up at my best at that time. One thing I used to do is look at home or travel magazines like Dwell or Architectural Digest.
So for me, I love the beach and beach houses and I love the mountains and cabins in the woods. So sometimes looking at pictures of those things first thing in the morning and really dreaming about having them gets me fired up and motivated. I actually have a separate instagram account that I created where I only follow accounts that post pictures of beach houses and cabins.
And I did that because I love looking at those pictures but I didn’t want to see other things coming through in my feed first thing in the morning, so I just created a separate account so I could take those images in first thing.
So these are some examples for you, but remember that it’s about what works for you and you have to test them out and never be afraid of just listening to what you need on any given day and modifying based on what you learn.
I want to end by giving you a few keys that you should think about as you’re moving forward with building your routine. Again, something like changing the way you spend the first 15 minutes of your morning might seem easy but we can run into some challenges with this and I just want to flag those for you now.
First, don’t measure your progress based on what you’ve seen or heard from other people who have elaborate morning routines. And that would include me - I would put myself in that category because I spend almost an hour or more each day on my morning routine.
But I gave you an example of my routine not because I want you to start out that way but because I wanted to give you a glimpse into some ideas for how you could structure yours. Each person has different needs and different limitations, so just because you hear about elaborate routines doesn’t mean that you’re doing it wrong or that you can’t get a lot out of a 15 minute routine.
Second, is to start small. Our brains actually hate change because they spend so much time putting the things we do on autopilot - it’s an evolutionary skill that our brains have developed in order to help us save energy and remain safe, so when you try to make too many changes at once your brain is going to fight you even harder on it. So just be aware of that.
Third, morning routines are not all or nothing. I want you to check yourself and make sure that as you build your routine, you’re not getting frustrated when it doesn’t work perfectly - and I can tell you from experience that it won’t work perfectly.
Being perfect every time with your routine is not what it’s about - it’s about getting value from the time you spend working on yourself. So even if you don’t get to do your whole 20-minute routine one morning and you only get to do 10 minutes of it - that’s ok. That’s a win for you, and if that happens you just make the decision to get up tomorrow morning and try again.
Fourth, think about accountability partners who you might loop into helping you follow through with this. Maybe it’s a spouse or a partner or a roommate or a friend who you enlist to help keep you accountable as you start to flip your morning. No shame in asking someone to help keep tabs on you and check in on how you’re doing.
Last - I want you to think hard about your priorities and how they relate to our perception of time. Putting yourself first by using a morning routine has a lot to do with what you prioritize.
Many people I’ve worked with have told me that they just don’t have time in the morning to create a routine. Here’s my take on that: if you REALLY want to take care of yourself first, and if it’s REALLY a priority for you, then you’ll have time to do it. If it’s not a priority for you, then you’ll never have the time to do it.
There’s this saying that goes something like “When someone says they don’t have time for something, what they really mean is it’s not a priority.” And I truly believe that.
If I ask you to help me wash my car this weekend for an hour, you might say to me “Hey sorry, I don’t have time for that.” Or you might say there’s no way I’ll ever help you with that go to a car wash instead. But if I ask you to help me wash my car and I say, I’ll pay you $300 to help me - that might be something you might find some time to do.
So I’m ending with this concept about time and your perception of it because if you struggle to find time to do this in the morning, at the root of that might be the need to really look closely at what you prioritize and what’s ACTUALLY important to you. There might be some bigger questions and some changes that it might be time for you to look further into.
A morning routine is a great way to not only change the way your day goes, but to start to dig into what’s really meaningful to you. And that’s worth thinking about.
Go have a great workday.