The Miracle Morning shows how to wake up each day with more energy, motivation, and focus to take your life to the next level.
The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM)
What if you could wake up tomorrow and EVERY area of your life was beginning to transform? What would you change?
Animated Video by OnePercentBetter & Productivity Game
Key Takeaways
Six basic yet powerful personal development habits that when stacked together and used to start each day, will create changes in your life that author Hal Erod calls miraculous.
"Our levels of success will rarely exceed our level of personal development, because success is something we attract by who we become."
6 Timeless Personal Development Habits
Habit 1. Silence
Most of us live busy and stressful lives, so take some time out of your day to disconnect yourself from the world. Be intentional about it. This could be meditation, prayer, self-reflection, deep-breathing, expressing gratitude or whatever else floats your boat.
- By starting your morning with silence, you create a calm and peaceful reference point you can turn to when the day feels noisy and chaotic.
- Think of your morning meditation like lighting a candle you can use to find your way back to peace of mind when you feel anxious and stressed.
- If you’re new to meditation, try beginning with 5 minutes. I also recommend the popular guided meditation app called Headspace if you have no clue where to start.
If you want calm, clarity and peace of mind, do the opposite of what most people do and start every morning with a period of purposeful silence.
Habit 2. Affirmations
The purpose of a written affirmation is to program your mind with the beliefs, attitudes, behaviors and habits that are vital to your being able to attract, create and to sustain your ideal levels of success in every area of your life.
- It’s something you confirm to yourself, preferably out loud, not just written. One of the favorites of Tim Ferriss is “I am not rushed.”
- Consider one transformation you want to make in your life and phrase it as I ___ will be then state your aspirational identity. For example — I Jane will be an honor student, I Rashiid will be a keynote speaker.
- Repeating an affirmation every morning is like adjusting a thermostat on your life. An affirmation primes your brain to believe your capable of more, which raises the set point on your standards and pushes you to do the work to reach your desired set point like a furnaces does the work to reach the desired temperature.
- Muhamed Ali known for “I am the greatest”
"It's the repletion of affirmations that led to belief. Once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen."
Habit 3. Visualization
Imagine a result you want to achieve. Then picture yourself what you need to do to get there. Highly successful people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tony Robbins practice this and it’s one of the principles in Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.
- If you struggle with visualization, try looking at real images or inspiring videos of what you want.
- Visualize the work you need to do today that will help you become the person you aspire to be.
- See yourself like an olympic downhill skier visualizing the turns down the mountain.
- By visualizing yourself executing a task, like starting a difficult project or making a difficult phone call, you make the task easier to execute later in the day because during visualization your brain fires and strengthens the same neural circuits you’re going to use when you complete the task.
- Studies show that people who simply visualize playing a piece of music on the piano or shooting a free throw display nearly the same physical improvement as people who physically practiced.
Habit 4. Exercise
This is no news to anyone. Every morning you have to get your heart rate up, get your blood flowing and fill your lungs with oxygen. Don’t just exercise at the end or middle of the day and try to incorporate some for of movement early in the morning. The benefits are way to great to ignore.
- When you increase your heart rate with aerobic exercise, you trigger the release of chemicals in your brain, dopamine, norepinephrine, BDNF, which significantly increases your ability to focus for several hours
"In order for man to be successful in life, God provided him with two means- education and physical activity...with these two means, man can attain perfection."
Habit 5. Reading
Books are the richest source of high quality curated knowledge. Inside every book, there are nuggets of wisdom that will help you make progress in any area of life you’re struggling with.
- If you struggle to read, watch some animated book summaries or try listening to audio books.
- Whichever area of life you want to improve, go into amazon, search that topic and buy two highly rated books on the topic.
- Go to the library and pick up a stack of a few books on the interest.
- To make sure those suggests of wisdom stick, stop reading after 10 minutes and start writing.
"Reading to the mind, is what exercise is to the body."
Habit 6. Scribing/Journaling
In other words, journaling. It’s extremely underrated, helps you to get to know yourself which is absolutely critical for living a fulfilled life. You can do so many things with your journal: brain dumps to reduce stress, review your goals, ask yourself life-changing questions, establish important tasks for the day, capture business ideas, express gratitude to become happier- the list is endless.
- Write down the ideas you’ve collected.
- Brainstorm ways you can incorporate them into your life.
- When you write down ideas and implementation plans, you dramatically increase the odds that you’ll retain and act on the nuggets of wisdom you’ve just acquired.
"The problem with making mental notes is that the ink fades very rapidly."
How to Create a Morning Routine by BetterThanYesterday
How you wake up in the morning effects your entire day. If you begin your morning with momentum, you can keep it up for the rest of the day. So Hal created a morning routine that he calls “The Miracle Morning”, which helps you start the day full of motivation and enthusiasm.
But before we get to the routine, you need to wake up first. The old saying “you snooze you lose”, may have a much deeper meaning than any of us realized. When you delay waking up until you absolutely have to, consider that what you’re doing is actually resisting your life.
Here a few tips how you can resist pressing that snooze button.
- Move alarm across the room. This forces body movement and motion creates energy, so it helps you wake up.
- Brush your teeth. The point is that you’re doing a mindless activity for the first few minutes and simply giving your body time to wake up.
- Since you’re in a bathroom already, splash some water on your face, it will wake your up even further.
- Drink a glass of water. After 6-8 hours without water you’ll be naturally dehydrated and dehydration causes fatigue. The objective is to rehydrate your body and mind as fast as possible, to replace the water you were deprived of during the hours you slept.
Life Savers
S = Silence
You can either do meditation or just heavy deep breathing, while you let your mind wander. It will help you clear your head of all the negative thoughts and reduce stress. Just do it for 5 minutes. But make sure you don’t do it in bed, you don’t want to fall asleep again!
A = Affirmations
Your self talk has a dramatic influence on your mood. When you design and write out your affirmations, align them with what you want to accomplish and commit to repeating them daily – they make an impression on your subconscious mind.
You can over come your limiting beliefs and behaviors and replace them with those you need to succeed.
- Here’s an example if you want to lose weight, your affirmation might look something like this: I am 100% committed to going to the gym 5 days a week and running on a treadmill for 20 minutes.
- The more specific the actions the better. Customize them to your needs and also feels free to add some inspiration quotes in.
V = Visualizations
Visualizing your goals and dreams is believed by some experts to attract your visions into your life. Whether or not you believe in law of attraction, visualization lifts up your spirit and emotions and pulls you toward your vision. It can be a powerful tool for overcomming self limiting habits such as procrastination.
E = Exercise
Morning exercise should be a staple in everyones daily ritual. When you exercise even for a few minutes every morning it significantly boosts your energy and mental clarity.
- Every morning you gotta get your hearth rate up and fill lungs with oxygen. Whether you do some yoga, go for a walk or run is up to you.
R = Reading
Whatever you want in your life, there are countless books on how to get it. The key is to learn from the experts, those who have already done what you want to do. With an almost infinite amount of books available on every topic, there are no limits to the knowledge you can gain through daily reading.
- I recommend making a commitment to read at least 10 pages per day.
- Lets do some math here. Reading 10 pages per day equals 3650 per year, which equates approximately eighteen 200-page personal development books.
- So 10 pages a day equals 18 books per year. I guarantee that if you start reading today you’ll see major improvement in your life.
S = Scribing
Scribing is just another word for writing. You can write about anything. You can have a dream journal, write about your goals and plans, lessons learned and so on. Anything you feel like you need to focus on in your life writing will help you capture ideas.
The process of writing something down forces us to think through it enough to understand it.
You can do each activity for as long as you wish, but try not to exceed 1 hour with your morning routine. Try to implement some of the ideas talked about in this video and customize the savers for your needs.
Remember, these are just ideas on how you can upgrade your morning. This is not something you HAVE to do to have a great one.