Ep. 8 Morning Routine
Wed, 8/5 10:25AM • 26:15
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
feeling, elephant, habit, feelings, success, productivity, day, environment, control, emotions, book, actions, routine, episode, morning routine, squats, important, talked, people, incorporate
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I felt out of control and trapped. I felt guilty for not doing more. I felt like I was letting people down. I felt frustrated and agitated. I felt tightness and tension in my shoulders and back. I felt discouraged. I felt lazy and unmotivated. And how does our definition of success shape how we live our daily lives? Join me Your host Michael Bauman as we create a life of success by exploring the cutting edge research and happiness,motivation, psychology, philosophy, and welcome to thrive, culture,success.
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All of these thoughts and feelings ran through my mind and body as I sat for a couple minutes doing a mind body scan. For those of you who don't know what this is, essentially you sit quietly for a couple minutes for the purpose of becoming more aware of what you are Feeling and the current moment. You begin by asking yourself, what am I feeling physically right now. And then starting at the top of your head, you work your way all the way down to your toes.
So for instance, it might look something like this, you know, I have tension, a little bit of tension, you know, in my forehead, maybe you have a little bit of a headache. You know, there's slight tension in your jaw. You know, you might even notice your breathing. You know, whether it's short and shallow, maybe it's deep, moving down into your neck, you feel whether there's tension in your neck or feel, whether you're carrying anything your shoulders, but also you might, you might notice, Are you hot, or are you cold, or you might just notice the feel of the clothes on your body. You're getting you're tuning into what your body is feeling in the current moment.
So you move down through your chest, maybe you feel a tightness in your chest, maybe not. Maybe you're full. Maybe you're hungry. You can feel the weight of your body sitting on the chair resting on the chair. All the way down to the feeling of your feet resting on the floor. Now you're not looking for anything in particular, you're just observing. You're just becoming aware of what is going on with your body in this moment, after you have spent a little bit of time working your way from your head down to your toe.
So with what you're feeling physically, then you ask yourself the question, What am I thinking about right now, spend a little bit of time allowing all of your thoughts to pass through your brain. Now, it's very important to not try to control them, or change them. You are essentially just an outside observer that's looking in and you want to look at them essentially, like clouds in the sky.
So you have a thought and you note it and you let it pass by something else pops up and you note it and let it pass by
next ask yourself what am I feeling emotionally right now? Again, we don't want to we don't want to judge just like the current feelings that you have rise to the forefront of your awareness and observe them as they pass.
Now this simple exercise can be incredibly powerful in a lot of different ways. First of all, it helps you become aware of what is actually going on inside of you in the current moment, oftentimes, a lot of us have no idea what's going on inside of us, or we have so many things going through our brain or pulled in so many different directions, that we don't take a moment to really tune in and see what am I thinking, What am I feeling, you know, what's my body feeling right now.
And that's that's the second aspect of this exercise. It actually helps you connect the your physical feelings with your mental and emotional states. So this is the foundation in the start essentially, for any change in our life. It starts with becoming aware of what we're currently doing what we're currently thinking and feeling. And while we tend to think that a lot of our decisions and actions based solely on logic and reason, and we, you know, reason through these things, we have a lot of rationale around it.
Most often, our decisions are influenced more heavily by our emotions and feelings. And until we put a weight on them and a value on them, we won't actually be able to realize for one, how much they dictate our actions, and two, we won't be able to change them.
In the book switch by Chip and Dan Heath, they use the analogy of a rider riding on an elephant along a path to actually describe this, this idea. So your writer represents your logical brain is your rational brain, your prefrontal cortex, you know, the one that you know we think makes the decisions. The elephant actually represents the emotional side of who we are, how what we're feeling, how those feelings dictate our actions, and then the path the elephant's going down represents the environment. Now when we are trying to make a change, we think, you know, we usually appeal to the writer, we appeal to the logical, rational side of things. So we're like, well, this makes sense because of point A, B, and C, then we use that logic to try to direct the elephant or our emotions down a certain path because we want to get to a destination. And that may work for a certain period of time.
The problem comes when the elephant our emotions actually don't want to do that thing. Or when they want to do a different go down a different path or arrive at a different destination. Now the rider may may be able to, you know, hold that elephant going the way that it wants for a short period of time, you know, using our willpower, we're like, no, this makes sense. This is what is important to me right now. And we're just wrestling with our emotions and how we're feeling to try to point ourselves in the right direction. But ultimately, what most often happens is that elephant are our emotions and feelings went out. So when we don't feel like doing something we eventually just give it up, and then we are unable to achieve what we're wanting to achieve.
The reason that I'm talking about this right now is for a lot of us were we may be working from home during the coronavirus. And so we have a new environment, we have new feelings of being confined and trapped or feelings of fear and uncertainty that we don't have otherwise. And we have, we may have new rationale and logic and thoughts going through our head. So knowing how to change our behavior, when our environment and stuff changes very beneficial.
So if we want to change behavior, we have to direct the writer, which involves clarifying the next steps we need to take, we have to motivate the elephant, which is becoming aware of our feelings, but then also leveraging, you know, how we feel to obtain the actions that we want to have, and then shape the path and this is this is understanding how our environment shapes our behavior, and then using that to shape our actions.
So let's talk about motivating the elephant or you know, leveraging our emotions first, as they are a big determinant of our actions. Now that mind body scan that we talked about at the start of the episode is an excellent way to become aware of our emotions First off, because we can't change them until we become aware of them, and how they're dictating our actions.
Now, we'll talk about some other ways that we can motivate the elephant or change our feelings or our emotional states a little bit later on in the episode, but for right now, I want to move on to shaping the path or how we can shape the environment.
So I want you to just take a minute and look around at your environment. This can apply whether you're at work or at home, you know, look at your environment and think about is my environment, the most conducive environment to set me up for success, you know, with what I'm wanting to accomplish? You know, maybe that's, you know, being pretty productive, maybe that's just the feeling of being relaxed and in control at home. Now we want to think about how can we shape the environment to actually achieve that success or achieve those feelings that we want to have.
So for instance, if you're at home, let's start with your food environment, or eating healthy. You know, if you have a bunch of food in your fridge or your pantry, that's unhealthy and junk food, I guarantee you, at some point, you're going to eat it. Right? So that environment is not actually setting you up for success in terms of maybe the goals that you want to have the feeling of health and vitality that you want to have, or even, you know, being productive throughout your day. You know, that's an aspect to think about with your environment.
The other aspect is, you know, is your environment clean? Is it organized, you know, when we have that environment that's not organized, it just creates this kind of undercurrent of stress in our lives. So really thinking About this intentionally allows us to create the environment that helps us feel in control and feel peace, even though so many things around us are out of our control. Now, if you remember from last episodes, when we talked about the spheres of control, our environment falls in the middle one, we have some control over it. So there's some things that we can do to help. But there's also the aspect of, you know, our kids might be running around, it's difficult to be productive, you know, we have some control over that. And there's things that, you know, we just don't have control over. So we do the best with what we have, and focus on the things we can control.
So we talked about how doing a mind body scan is an excellent way to become aware of our emotions and, you know, motivate that elephant. Then we talked about, you know, shaping our environment, or at least becoming aware of how our environment is affecting us, and then taking steps to adjust that to set us up for success.
And then the last step is directing the rider. So directing that logical rational part and a great way to do this. is becoming crystal clear on specific small steps that you can take to achieve what you want to achieve. Now we're going back to Episode Five that we talked about the tiny habits. This is where this comes in. Now what better place is there to start making a change than actually the start of the day in our morning routine.
I want you to think of a day in your life that you might have nailed your morning routine. Maybe you got up, maybe you did some stretching, you did a workout, you know, you had a healthy breakfast, everything seemed to align. I want you to for a brief second or brief minute, just think about the feeling that that gave you going into the day. It was just an incredible feeling. You have this feeling of accomplishing so much, even before the day even quote unquote, started.
Now what if you could have that feeling every day, or at least on a more consistent basis? What would that do for your interactions with other people or Would that do for your internal thoughts? And how you view yourself your self esteem, your confidence? What would that do for your productivity? Even if we make small changes, and have those quick wins or the success in the morning, it goes such a long way towards the overall tone of the day.
So how Elrod wrote a fantastic book about the morning routine called Miracle Morning. And he has some really specific things that you can do to implement into the into the morning routine. He says, always remember that who you're becoming is far more important than what you're doing. And yet it is what you're doing that is determining who you're becoming.
So let's talk about the morning routine a little bit in bJ foggs. Book, the tiny habits that we mentioned in Episode Five, he talked about the Maui habit. This is essentially when your feet hitting hit the floor after getting out of bed. You say to yourself, it's going to be a great day. Now this sets the intention for the entire day. Sometimes we do the opposite, right? Maybe we're feeling tired, maybe you're feeling lethargic. And we're like, man, today's gonna be rough. Right off the bat, we've set the tone for the entire day. But we can do the opposite. This is a very simple thing that requires nothing, except a tiny little bit of time to set the intention for the day. So you get up the minute your feet hit the floor, you say, it's going to be a great day.
Now, maybe you are really tired, or maybe yesterday didn't go very well. And you can't really say it's going to be a great day. It just doesn't feel right. So what you can do in that situation is you can say, it's going to be a great day and then just add somehow, on the end of it. When you add that somehow it gives the option for you to try to figure out how to make it a great day. Maybe it doesn't feel like it right now. But you're still going. It's going to be a great day and I'm going to figure out how to make it a great day and your brain starts to work and starts to think about how to make it a great day. Very simple habit.
And if we use the habit recipe that BJ Fogg talks about, you can just say after my feet hit the ground, I will say it's going to be a great day, or it's going to be a great day somehow. And then you celebrate, remember that celebration is so important. And that goes back to motivating that elephant as well. You're creating a feeling that reinforces that habit that you want to do. Another habit that you can start getting into in the morning, is making your bed. Now a lot of you know influential people do this because regardless of what's going on in your life, you have the control of being able to make your bed, you look at it, you get that feeling of being in control that feeling of success, even if it's a tiny little thing. So it's one thing that you can control, you get up, you make your read, it gives just gives you that feeling, it starts to build that momentum into your day.
Another thing that you could incorporate is maybe some stretching or maybe you do workout in the morning, and you get that feeling of after you accomplish the workout, you're really pumped up, you're like I did it, I accomplished something. Let's go and crush today. Some other things you might think about adding into your team might be something as small as drinking a full glass of water. After six to eight hours of sleeping, a lot of times we wake up dehydrated and water is so important for our brain function and just overall body and health. That a very simple thing is you build a habit around you know, getting a glass of water, or getting some multivitamins or some fish oil into that routine in the morning.
Then the another question to ask is How is your breakfast? Right? Does your breakfast make you feel energized? Does it make you feel like you accomplish something or do you know that it's, you know, giving you health as opposed to the opposite? Or do you even have breakfast? You know, that's something to think about. You know, making tiny changes to our breakfast can influence the entire rest of our day in there. You know, studies that actually show that.
And another thing you can think about is, you know, some form of meditation. Now that might be, you know, the loving kindness meditation that we talked about last, you know, last episode. Or it might be, you know, quick five minute mind body scan that we talked about at the beginning of this episode, just at the start of your day, getting an idea of how you're feeling, you know, what's going through your head, so that you can go into the day with intention and awareness.
Now, some of the habits that you can incorporate potentially into the middle part of your day. These are ones that I actually did when we were traveling these last two months, so we weren't at home. We are in multiple different, you know, countries, different locations, sleeping in other people's beds. And needless to say, This gave me a lot of the feelings that I mentioned at the start of this episode of feeling, you know, frustrated or out of control or agitated, or unmotivated. And another thing that It's very grounding for me personally, as far as my workouts and stuff go was all up in the air as well. It was hard figuring out when I could do them with no equipment and what exercises to do.
So I needed to figure out a way that I could manage this or that I could feel get that feeling of control and success, even when so many things were out of my control. Now, I went back to, you know, again, BJ Fogg in his book, tiny habits, he talked about how after he went to the bathroom, he he did two push ups. And that was how he incorporated exercise into the routine that was already in his day. For me, I found that doing three squats after I went to the bathroom was something that I could still feel that sense of control. And even though I'm not doing it crazy, killer workout, it still helps me move my body and helps me feel like I'm moving forward while something like this may seem trivial or inconsequential, easy to underestimate The power of what simple things can do to help you achieve that feeling of feeling in control or that feeling of success, and how simply having that feeling of success motivates you for other actions that might be bigger or more challenging.
To put this in perspective, simply from a numbers side of things. If you were to do three squats a day, and let's say you went to the bathroom five times during the day, that's 15 squats in the course of your day. If you multiply that out every day of the year, you've actually done 5475 squats that you didn't do before.
Granted, right, you're not lifting tons of weight. But this is something that is very attainable. It's very small, it fits in your day, and you can do anywhere. So that consistency long term, with a habit like that can actually produce quite a bit more than what you initially think
another tool that I really liked from bJ foggs book was what he called the celebration Blitz. Now this has everything to do with your environment, and actually how you dictate your emotional state. So what you do pick the messiest room of your house, you set a timer for three minutes. And every single item that you put away or put in his right spot or organize, you celebrate the heck out of it. So you're doing fist pounds or internally, you're just, you know, telling yourself, you're a rock star, you're awesome. And it's surprising how something as simple as this within three minutes, can shift your emotional state, you know, so maybe you're feeling that everything's out of control. You know that kids are driving you crazy. You can't get everything anything done. And it feels like everything is overwhelming, right?
So just take three minutes, messiest room in your house and celebrate every single item that you put away. Again, these things seem simple or maybe even seem silly, but you'd be surprised how much they can shift your emotions. state. And it also helps you shift your environment by giving you that sense of control. And that feeling of being organized and on top of things. what it also does, when you celebrate, like we talked about in Episode Five, this wires your brain to feel good.
So you start to associate feeling good with taking action. And that's an incredible thing to be able to do and to be able to do on demand as well. Another routine that you can start doing in your day is taking a little bit of time out of your day, and reaching out to friends or family. Now ideally, this might be with video or with a call, but you can do it by text message as well. Just having a specific touch point in your day so that you don't feel as isolated or you don't feel as alone can go a long way. During this time.
Now I wanted to briefly talk about productivity, and in the next episode, we'll dive into this in A lot of depth. Using David Allen's getting things done book. He's an incredibly well respected and sought after personal productivity expert. And he has a very complete and comprehensive system for how to get things done how to organize our life. That is fantastic. So we'll be talking about that in the next episode. But I wanted to give you a couple small things that you could do to help your productivity
Now, one thing is to try to avoid checking email until maybe after 10 or 11 in the morning. What this does when we check email right when we wake up, or right when we get started with our work, instead of us going into the workday with intention and priority, it actually distracts us with, you know what seemed may seem important from other people sending us messages or needing to respond to these messages and off right off the bat. With our day we get we can get off track. So if you wait until after 10 or 11 most of the emails that will have been sent in the morning will have been sent by that period of time that allows you to to A brief you know period of time, respond to what you need to do, you know, send the messages and then get back to the priority work that you need to do.
Another thing that you can think of during this time is think about sending maybe one business or one work related goal during a day. And then one personal goal. So it might be, you know, I need to send, you know, these five messages to these key clients, or the personal goal might be, you know, I want to make sure to get the laundry in today. If you accomplish that one thing, you get that feeling of success and that feeling of productivity and simplicity and consistency without all the time over distraction and confusion.
So pick one work related thing, one personal thing that you can do in a day. And also this is a great time to do more big picture thinking, you know, maybe it's doing some of the goals that we talked about in episodes one episodes to, you know, what do you really want your life to look like? What do you want your career to look like your relationship Look like thinking through that on a big picture level that you may not have time in the other routine to do. This is a great time to take advantage of that.
Then talking about our evening routine, some things you might consider incorporating would be you know, flossing your teeth, or reading books, you know, take this time to read books, what books have you wanted to read or on your list, you just keep putting it off. Use this time to actually maybe incorporate a reading habit at the end of your day to start improving yourself or benefiting yourself.
gratefulness and gratitude is another thing that you can put in in the evening routine. And that does a lot for shifting our mindset and our focus off of the negativity and shifting it on towards more positive things, or even some stretching and yoga in activates our parasympathetic nervous system, which is the one that helps us rest and recover and it goes a long way to reducing our stress. So those are the things that you can put in in the evening routine.
Some of the things that you can control for COVID-19 is just like everyone's saying, make sure to wash your hands, create a habit around after I flush the toilet, I wash my hands, try to cough or sneeze into your elbow, try not to touch your face, you know, and if you do do it with the inside part of your shirt, you know, avoid shaking hands with other people. And we all know about the social distancing, you know, but it really does help prevent the spread of the disease. And if you feel sick, you know, stay at home, it's for the best of everybody.
So to sum everything up, if you want to make a change in behavior, you have to first shape your path or your environment to set you up for success. You have to motivate the elephant or be aware of your emotions and how they affect your actions. And then you can leverage the power of celebration to actually wire those positive habits into your brain. And then you need to direct to the writer or that logical rational part by being super Pacific with the next steps that you need to take to change.
So out of the three different parts of our day, you know, the morning, maybe during the middle of the day, the evening, try picking just one One of the things that I mentioned and incorporating it into your day. So remember the morning you might do that Maui habit, and just start each day by saying today is going to be a great day. Start each day with intention. Or you might make your bed or stretch or exercise or meditate, have a healthy breakfast, that middle of the day, you might incorporate you know, the squats after going to the bathroom or push ups after going to the bathroom. Or do a celebration Blitz, just clean up the messiest room in your house for three minutes. Celebrate yourself for it, change your emotional state, and then the evening routine. Maybe you put in some reading or some gratefulness or some stretching in there to help you feel that sense of control and shift towards being positive during this time.
Now, I wanted to say a quick apology for the sound quality in the last couple of episodes. You know, like I mentioned over these last three, two and a half to three months. We've been traveling to different locations and it was very unexpected. We weren't able to come back to where I had all my equipment. pologize for that, but I wanted to continue to give you guys good content and good things to think about even though the sound quality might not have been what I would have hoped that it would be.
In the next episode, we're going to be doing a deep dive into productivity and using David Allen's book getting things done, and how using his system can exponentially increase your productivity and your ability to get consistent high quality results. I hope to see you back for another episode of Thrive culture success engineering with your host Michael Bauman. If you enjoyed this show, it would mean a lot to me. If you left a rating and review wherever you get your podcast, it really does help people find the show. Until next time, thank you for listening