Today, we're diving into the game-changing world of morning routines. Inspired by Hal Elrod's "The Miracle Morning," I'll walk you through the key elements of S.A.V.E.R.S: Silence, Affirmations, Visualizations, Exercise, Reading, and Scribing.
Morning routines set the tone for your day, and nailing them means taking charge of your life. From meditation to affirmations and exercise, these rituals pack a punch in just a few minutes. Find what resonates with you, whether it's a quick five-minute routine or a longer commitment.
As we approach 2024, let's make January 1st the day to kickstart a new habit. Merry Christmas and happy holidays—enjoy the time with your loved ones. I'll catch you on the next episode as we embrace the power of morning routines for a fulfilling year ahead!
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ABOUT THE HOST:
JEREMY IS A MEDITATION TEACHER, LIFE COACH, AND DIGITAL HABITS EXPERT WHO WORKS WITH ENTREPRENEURS, EXECUTIVES, AND LEADERS.
Jeremy overcame addiction, shame, self-judgement, and depression in his early twenties with the help of mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness not only helped him let go of destructive behaviors, it also allowed him to connect with deeper meaning and purpose in his life.
For the past 10 years Jeremy has been teaching mindfulness and emotional intelligence practices at universities, recovery centers, and companies throughout Asia and the US. He holds a Bachelors and Master’s degree in Genetics and Genomics, and spent several years at Duke University working towards a PhD in Genetics & Systems Biology before he turned full-time to teaching mindfulness.
Jeremy is also an ICF certified Executive Coach. As a former scientist and academic, Jeremy has a great passion for bringing his EI based coaching skills into the corporate and professional world. He realizes how powerful & transformative these practices can be for skeptics and senior-level managers. He is known for his calm and grounded demeanor, his expertise in habits and high-performance, and his compassionate approach to transformation.
Coaching Certifications
* CPCC, Co-Active Training Institute
* ICF Member
* ACC International Coaching Federation
Jeremy is a Certified Teacher with the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence program initially developed at Google. He also spent time living and training as a fully-ordained Buddhist monk in Myanmar. He now combines his science-based expertise with a hunger for personal development to help others discipline their minds and achieve genuine inner- peace and fulfillment.
You're listening to unhooked. On today's episode tips for a powerful morning routine. Covering the book, the miracle morning by Hal Elrod. I'm going to be exploring a few different ingredients of a powerful morning routine. You can start to implement in your life. I'll also be covering how I approach morning routines and what I do in my personal practice. So stay tuned.
So hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another episode of unhooked. And as we head towards the new year, I want us to do a podcast on morning routines. Morning routines are something that. Are so important for recovery, you know, so important for changing your habits, cultivating healthy new ones, letting go of unhealthy habits. Because if there's one new habit, you can develop an implement. That gets you the most bang for your buck.
It would be a morning routine. And in fact, a morning routine is something where you can jam pack a lot of the healthy habits that you want to start cultivating. All into one session. So if you reasons why. Morning routines are so powerful. One is that it sets the tone for the day. You know, it sets the tone, not just for the day, but for the week, not just for the week, but for the month.
And. For the rest of your life. Really, if you can win the morning, you can win the day. So you get that quick win in the morning and you get that feeling of accomplishment, that feeling of doing the right thing, and that will carry over into the rest of the things that you do during the day. You know, if you prove to yourself that you can do hard things. You prove to yourself that you are a man of your word, that you have discipline, that you have commitment. It's going to be much easier to follow through on the rest of your commitments. Also by committing to a morning routine, you also started taking your bedtime more seriously. If you know that you have to wake up and you want to, you know, make the best use of your morning. Then you start thinking about how getting to sleep late actually starts impacting that. And you start prioritizing your sleep. You know, instead of staying up late, just mindlessly scrolling. You might say, Hey, let me put this down because I know I want to get up early. And get a crack on my morning routine.
So that's another benefit of having a morning routine.
Another kind of benefit of morning routines is that it's a great time to what you might call, eat your vegetables. Eat your vegetables and doing the things that are good for you that you know, are good for you, but it might be harder to do later in the day or when you have less willpower. I see this all the time with meditation. People who put meditation in the morning. Uh, much more likely to stick with it and be consistent with it and see the benefits from it. Then people who say they're going to do it later in the day.
People who say they're gonna do it in the afternoon. Or on a lunch break. Or in the evening. Because those people, most often don't stick with it. It just becomes too hard later on in the day. If it's not already a habit. And so another again, benefit of the morning routine. Is you do these things that you know are good for you before?
Anything else before you start checking your email before you start. Getting into your work or talking with other people. It's just much easier to get those out of the way at the start of the day. The final reason, I'd say the final reason. To cultivate a morning routine. Is that it helps you become the driver of your life.
You become the one in charge rather than a passenger, rather than reacting to life, you know, waking up, turning on your phone, checking your email and being reactive and just saying, okay, what fires do I have to put out? Who's pulling my attention. You get to intentionally decide how you want to live your life. You know, you were putting your foot down saying these are the things that are important to me. And as we're going to talk about, one of the things I'll mention later is planning your day and saying, here's what I want to do today.
Here's what I want to accomplish. So I could go on and on, you know, there's a bunch more reasons why morning routines are important. Why they're helpful in this journey of recovery, whether you're recovering from porn addiction. Junk food. Dating apps, gambling, whatever it is that you're dealing with, even if it's not an addiction, just getting your life on the right track. Having a powerful morning routine is so, so important. And as I'm going to talk about in this episode, there are many ways to cut the cake.
There are many different ways to design a morning routine. That works for you. It can be as little as like two or three minutes all the way up to 60 minutes or more. And so in this episode, I'm going to talk about what are some of the options that you have some different ingredients you might want to put into your morning routine? And. How long they should take how to actually go about doing it and give you some examples as well.
So if something's not clear to you, you'll have some examples in this episode.
Another note on this. So I'm going to be going through the book the miracle morning or going through at least his outline his method. Of the miracle morning by Hal Elrod. And it's just a great primer on morning routines. It's something that I read and implemented a lot of it. I don't stick with it a hundred percent in terms of doing all the things that he lists out in there.
And I'll talk about a little bit later, what I specifically do from my morning routine. But the framework that hel L rod offers in that book is a great one. And he goes through what he calls the life savers. So the acronym savers is the thing we're going to be covering here. S a V E R S each one of those letters stands for a different component of the morning routine. So just very briefly, I'll go over all of them and then we'll go into each one in a little bit more detail. The S stands for silence. A stands for affirmations.
The stands for visualizations. He stands for exercise. R stands for reading an S stands for scribing. Or journaling or writing. So let's go through these one by one, the first one S four silence. And this is really about meditation with making time for solitude. You know, this can be as simple as sitting comfortably and following your breath for a few minutes, it could be doing a more involved meditation.
If you're a meditation practitioner. But it can also just be sitting with no agenda and nothing to do. You know, just sitting in making time. For stillness for silence. For being with yourself, you know, cultivating some awareness of the present moment. This is something that I cover in depth in my online course, mindfulness made easy and also in my unhooked course. But there are many different ways to get into meditation. And get into stillness and silence. So again, some resources check out my own course. Unhooked and mindfulness made easy. There's also many, uh, online timers and apps that you can get into. So that's the first component that you could do.
And again, it could be as little as 30 seconds. It could be a two minute meditation. You could do five minutes. You could do 10 minutes. You could do 20 minutes, whatever suits your schedule. And however much you want to push yourself. The second component of the lifesavers is a, that stands for affirmations. I personally, almost always was quite allergic to affirmations.
You know, they always felt a bit cheesy or sentimental something like the secret. But in the end, this step is really about creating a list of phrases that reminds you of your highest potential. Would that reminds you of wisdom and teachings that you don't want to forget? So there are many great examples.
You can look up different affirmations on the internet. There's some in the miracle morning book. But I really encourage you to find examples that resonate with you. Find a words or phrases that resonate with you. So I'm going to give you just a sample of a part of an affirmation that I've used in the past.
So this is one that I used and I kind of adapted it from something I saw from how L rod. So it goes like this. Purpose. My life's purpose is to add value to the lives of others. Which starts with understanding myself deeply. Cultivating wisdom and compassion. And never settling less. For less than I can be. I know that I've been supported in unimaginable ways throughout my life. And I commit to pay it forward. And to learn through experience, how to help others become their greatest and most fulfilled selves. So that's an example of an affirmation.
It's something that I remind myself of that is important to me. I remind myself of what I find meaningful, what my values are and what I'm committed to. So that's an example of an affirmation. The third step V is for visualizations. This step is about spending some time visualizing yourself. In what a good future looks like to you?
You know, it could be visualizing yourself being successful at your goals. Achieving success in your life. You could also visualize what you need to do that day and imagine that going well. You can also spend some time envisioning your dream life. You know, where you're living, where you're living with, what is it like and how do you feel in that future? One of the ways that I've done this is to create a vision board.
So this is just a collection of photos. That can inspire you in what your dream life might look like or what success might look like. So you can make one of these and simply put it on a slide show, you know, just. Maybe get 10 or 20 photos and just put it on a slideshow and watch it for one to two minutes each morning, just to again, tap into. What is that vision of a good life look like for you?
The next letter in the savers is E for exercise. And the key ingredient for this step is to move your body. This can be stretching or jogging. Powerlifting dancing. As long as you're moving your body, then it's good in my book. So a very easy way to get into this is in the morning to do 10 squats and 10 pushups. You know, just a few body weight squats, and a few pushups already is getting some of the benefits of this exercise. You can do anything beyond that. You know, that suits your schedule.
So again, it can be a full on gym workout full on exercise. It can be going for a run. Hitting the gym playing a sport. Doing 10 minutes of yoga, anything that moves your body and gets your heart pumping a little bit is helpful.
The next in the list is our, and this stands for reading and this is about feeding your brain, you know, like feeding yourself. Nutrition, you know, nutrition is not just the food you're eating. It's also what you're feeding your mind and your soul. So finding books that inspire you or cause you to think. Uh, and then finding, you know, a certain amount of time or a certain number of pages to read.
So you could do. Something as simple as saying, I need to read at least one page in this book each morning. And if you feel like reading longer, you can, it can also be five minutes. It can be whatever suits you. So this can be one minute, can be 10 minutes. It's up to you. Some of my personal favorite. Personal development books. Uh, deep work by Cal Newport, the joy of living by young
the subtle art of not giving a fuck by mark Manson. Happiness by MeToo Ricard. The life-changing magic of tidying up by Marie Kondo. And wherever you go there you are by Jon Kabat-Zinn. So those are a few ideas of books to read. But again, anything that inspires you that makes you feel uplifted could also be learning. You know, learning about how to invest, how to create a business. How to make yourself into a better person.
Finally S the last letter in the acronym is for scribing.
And this is just a fancy way of saying journaling or writing. And one of the most common traits of successful people. Outside of having some sort of meditation practice or reflection practice is journaling. And so for this, you can do whatever form of journaling you like. For example, a free flow journaling practice.
This is, you know, just writing it doesn't matter what it is. You just sit down and let your thoughts flow onto the page. You can also plan your day. I'm a big fan of this one as well. Where you write down, what are the things you want to accomplish that day or do that day? You could do some gratitude, journaling, reflecting on what you're grateful for.
What are you appreciative of in your life? Or you can look online and just find different prompts that you want to reflect on. There's so many resources out there. You really have no excuse for not finding prompts because you can just Google it and you'll find it. So those are the. Different components of the life savers. Say versus the acronym from the miracle morning by Hal Elrod. A few tips on this pick and choose what makes most sense for you?
You. You know, if all six of these is too many. I come up with maybe two or three that feel like they're really resonating with you. Like you really could appreciate these in your life. You know, for me, Exercise. Meditation. And journaling, you know, those three are kind of the ones that I really connect with and I think are so important. At the very least meditation. Maybe some pushups. But finding what works for you.
And again, you could simplify this. So it says a little as five minutes, or it can be longer than that. If you have 20 minutes, you can make it 20. So for example, a five minute morning routine could be as simple as you wake up. 10 squats and 10 pushups that could take two minutes. Let's say you do two minutes of meditation. And then one minute where you're just planning out the day and saying, well, what do I want to do today? That's five minutes right there.
Very easy. You can expand that to make it. You know, fit yourself. I would also say to pick something that you feel you can be consistent with at least 95% of the time. Of course, there might be Daisy skip or miss. Aim for a hundred percent. But be happy with 95%, you know, aim for something that you feel like you can get 95% of the time.
For myself these days, the most important thing on my morning routine is meditation.
And this, you know, in part, I just came out of my retreat again. And it just reminded me of how important. Meditation and particularly mindfulness really is for recovery. It's this. You know, you're cultivating the quality of equanimity, which is the non-reactive part of the mind, the mind that doesn't grasp after what's pleasant. Or run away from what's unpleasant.
It has that strength, that resilience. To be with what is without running away from it or grasping after it. And that really is so much of what recovery is about. So that is it for today, about morning routines, you know, morning routines are so, so powerful. So I really hope that you take this episode. And you use it to inspire you to commit to a morning routine for yourself. As we're heading closer and closer to the start of 20, 24, you know, there's no better time. Then January 1st to start a new habit. And be consistent with it. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode. We'll have one more episode before 2024. So Merry Christmas and happy holidays. I hope you all enjoy your holiday time with your families and with yourself. And with that, I'll catch you on the next episode.