In this video, I help you create morning rituals for mental focus: all the mind moments you'll need for more productivity, energy and success! What do all the highly successful people from Benjamin Franklin all the way to Steve Jobs have in common? It's their morning routines and rituals that help them focus the mind. Watch this to increase your productivity, energy and success!

No time to watch this 9-minute video? Read the transcript below!

LINKS IN VIDEO:

○ My Livestream Meditations Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgSmPfcaRy59YSD4pPTiNEXCQ803Q1wbO
○ Tim Ferriss - How Top Performers Start Their Mornings: https://youtu.be/6ymKfqFSHck
○ Tim Ferriss “Tools of Titans”: https://geni.us/ViSqEAD
○ Tim Ferriss “Tribe of Mentors”: https://geni.us/ZRSUBd
○ Hal Elrod “The Miracle Morning”: https://geni.us/0yoDI2
○ Morning Pages: https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 - Intro
00:39 - What Do Your Mornings Look Like?
1:16 - What’s the Big Deal with Mornings?
1:41 - Tim Ferriss Interviews with High Performers’ Morning Routines
2:25 - Morning Rituals of Highly Successful People
2:51 - How Morning Rituals Have Helped My Busy Life
3:49 - 6 Ways to Create Your Morning Routines for Mental Focus
4:03 - Silence
4:23 - Affirmations
5:06 - Visualisations
6:28 - Exercise
6:49 - Reading
7:10 - Writing
8:19 - How to Start Your Morning Rituals
8:57 - What’s Next?

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, and welcome back to my channel.

In this video, I’ll talk about some of the morning rituals you can do to improve your mental focus at the start of your morning - setting you up to have a productive, successful day with more energy than you’ve ever had.

If we haven’t met yet, Hi! I’m Jaime Tan at Enlightened Spoon. On this channel you’ll get nutrition, fitness and lifestyle tips to help bring some calm into your busy life just like today’s, and other times you’ll get yoga and meditation videos - It’s all the mind, body, soul moments you can include into your life to help you stress less, yet accomplish more. So hit that Like button and consider subscribing if you want more like this.

What Do Your Mornings Look Like?

Are you rushing out the door, screaming at the kids to hurry up? Or if you don’t have kids, maybe it’s a constant rush to not be late for your first appointment of the day? Perhaps on a number of occasions you might have thought “I’ve got to get better at this”... or maybe you just haven’t given it much thought.

The thing is: how you set yourself up at the start of your day really sets the tone for how the rest of your day will flow, and there’s been so much interest and emphasis on the morning routines of highly successful people from Benjamin Franklin all the way through to Steve Jobs because of this.

What’s the Big Deal with Mornings Anyway?

If you think about it, at the start of the day - your mind is quiet, there’s been less stimulation and distractions and you’re able to tap into that often more intuitive side of you. When your mind is quiet, and the world around you is quiet - sitting and tuning into what is present can often lead to huge personal insights.

Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-hour work week, has spent a large part of his time interviewing high performers at the top of their game from billionaires, athletes, writers, poker players, bitcoin and blockchain experts and everyone in between on his podcast and even wrote 2 books about it “Tools of Titans” and “Tribe of Mentors”. They highlight what these successful people did to achieve their success, and some major themes emerged. And as you can probably already guess, the first 60 - 90 minutes of everyday was spent intentionally.

While the path to success has no structure to it, the lifestyles and habits that lead to success often have these similarities: successful people who are productive and stay energised often engage in some kind of mental focus activity, which often gets worked into their morning routines: meditation, a gratitude practice of some kind - whether that’s prayer or reflection time, journaling, keeping lists and exercise of some kind.

I’ll put a link to Tim Ferriss’ video where he talks about some of these morning routines.

My Personal Experience

Over the years, I’ve been adapting a variety of these practices and it's what's helped me maintain a full-time job as an Executive Producer in advertising - shooting commercials with celebrities and professional athletes working at a very high-intense level, as well as having my own wellness coaching business and teaching yoga and meditation on the side too.

I’ve found the busier my days get, the more sticking to my morning rituals of meditation and some kind of movement practice - whether that’s yoga, kettle-bell training, pilates or barre… and more recently adding journaling to this - has really helped me stay mentally focused to deal with the variety of demands and challenges being on a mega commercial production brings with it.

In fact, I think without any of my meditation or movement practices, I would probably be a lot more neurotic and stressed out than I already am. It’s really the grounding factor in my life.

“The Miracle Morning” by Hal Elrod

So. How do you create your own morning ritual for success and productivity? Let’s turn to Hal Elrod’s “The Miracle Morning” for some ideas. It’s a great book, and I’ll summarize the points for you here, with how I’ve adapted some of his points to my life:

1. Silence

Start every morning with a period of purposeful silence of at least 5 minutes. Give your mind and body that time to start up - rather than reaching over and grabbing the phone and bombarding your mind with distractions.

2. Affirmations

Repeat a positive sentence or phrase of everything you want to embody - keeping it in the present tense. And repeat this like a mantra every morning. I like starting this off with a gratitude practice - as I find starting from a place of appreciation, really helps to bring me into a place of openness, and when you’re open and more receptive… it’s a lot easier to believe and embody all of the affirmations you repeat.

So very simply start with 3 things you are grateful for in your life right now, in this present moment. Or even just ONE thing that you’re grateful for. And find a different thing to be grateful for everyday, so that you don’t just go into autopilot mode with this.

3. Visualization

Imagine what you want to achieve and mentally rehearse what you’ll need to do to achieve it. Sometimes it doesn’t need to be a thing that you want to achieve, it could simply be a feeling you want to embody, or a quality you want to enhance in your life - for example, Joy, and visualising, sensing that feeling state of joy and happiness - and what that feels like in the body.

Sometimes instead of visualizing - which can sometimes be about projecting into the future - and there’s nothing wrong with that we need different tools and techniques for different times, I simply sit and be present with what is here. A meditation practice. So instead of visualising, I sit and meditate. Especially when there’s a lot going on and the mind is full… simply noticing what is arising in the mind, and feeling what body sensations might also be arising because of it - for example a tightness around the chest, or an openness around the throat. And that simple act of witnessing what is present is oftentimes enough for it to shift into something else.

If you’d like to meditate along with me, you can check out this playlist with a series of livestream meditations I did. And hey, if you’re getting some ideas so far on what you might like to include into your morning rituals - hit that like button and let me know in the comments below!

4. Exercise

This can be very gentle movements to slowly wake the body up. Check my previous video for a gentle wake-up and stretch yoga you can do as you’re rolling out of bed, or stay tuned for my next couple of videos for a more dynamic strength + resistance training as well as a morning yoga flow.

5. Reading

Learn from the experts and model successful people who have already achieved what you want. If you feel like you have “no time” to read - simply set aside 5 or 10 minutes every morning, after your 5 - 10 minutes of silence and contemplation to read. It’s as simple as that!

6. Writing

You can also call this journaling. What to journal about? It could simply be reflections on the silence, affirmations, visualisations or meditation that you just did, or could also be a brain dump of anything coming up for you.

You could do it “Morning Pages” style - where it’s a freeflow stream of consciousness style of simply vomiting words onto a page - whatever thoughts, anxieties, feelings, frustrations, fears, dreams… even the banal, boring “what the F” am I supposed to write about thoughts can go on this page. Often the simple act of starting with just a chicken scrawl sentence or two of thoughts that seem to have no meaning, can often kickstart that bigger brain dump. Some days they’ll lead to insights. Some days you’ve just had a brain dump. Either way, it’s all good.

How to Start Creating Your Own Morning Rituals?

These are all ideas for you as a starting point - you can do all of them in succession, or pick and choose the one or two you’d like to start with first.

So perhaps go to bed half an hour earlier tonight, so you can wake up half an hour earlier tomorrow morning to spend a bit of time on your morning rituals for mental focus. It might feel like a mission initially - but aren’t most things, when you’re new to them and trying to figure it out? You might suck it at for a little bit before it clicks, so keep going and trust in the process.

For more morning rituals on how to stop waking up tired, you might like to watch this previous video for the things you can do in bed, as you’re waking up… little hacks you can incorporate into your morning routine before you work on the mental focus activities we just talked about in this video.

Stay tuned for my next video where I’ll be collaborating with a personal trainer to give you the strength and resistance trainings you can also incorporate to level up your mornings!

Don’t forget to hit like and subscribe for more nutrition, fitness and lifestyle rituals to help you flow through your busy life with more grace, ease and flow, and I’ll see you in the next one!

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