How intentional are you about your life? How much thought do you give to how you start your day? Everyone wants to start the day being productive. How you achieve that depends on the choices that you make from the time you open your eyes in the morning. Learn how you can pick the right attitude and choice each day to help you live an intentional life.
First Step To Intentional Living
How intentional are you about your life? How much thought do you give to how you start your day? I’m not talking about when you got your coffee and then sitting down to start working. I’m talking about from the moment you open your eyes, what do you do next? Do you hit the snooze ten times? Do you force yourself out of bed to stretch and brush your teeth? Do you immediately reach for your phone? None of these choices is necessarily wrong, but it could be the difference between a super productive day and successful life and one that leaves you frustrated and feeling like you didn’t get much then. Here’s how to make sure you’re starting your day as strongly as you possibly can. Consider what happens next. We’re back at intentionality again and creating an intentional life. In an earlier episode, I thought about what I think is the absolute number one cornerstone habit that will create an intentional life for you and that is meditation.
I want to talk about where that fits in and what I see is the other cornerstone habit. When I say cornerstone, what I mean by that is this is the one habit or this is the second one, but these are the two habits that if you put into your life and they become part of your life, then you will make everything that you do more intentional. That’s what we’re talking about and I think the way you create the design for an amazing life and lead an amazing life is to be intentional about leading that intentional life. The second cornerstone habit is the way you start your day. I like to think of it as my morning routine or my morning ritual. I’ve been working on my morning ritual and this is my twelfth year now. I started twelve years ago doing this. All it means is that I’ve consciously programmed the way my day starts every single day. When I say every single day, that’s my intention. No one’s perfect. More than maybe 90% of my day starts like this.
My day starts with first brushing my teeth and drinking some water. Lately, I’m drinking some water with my supplements, and then immediately going into meditation. It’s that absolute cornerstone on that cornerstone. Meditation is the cornerstone of my morning ritual. After that, then I will do some exercise or yoga and this is what works for me. I’m just telling you my ritual. Your ritual will probably be different. I highly recommend you have some level of meditation in there, but your morning ritual is going to be different. I’m just walking through mine and my thought processes, but one of the key things is it’s not set in stone. What I’m doing now is different from what I did twelve years ago. You sit down to plan your morning ritual. What you want to do is you also want to plan in a debrief. You want to look at your calendar and say, “30 days from now, this is what I’m going to do for 30 days. After 30 days, I’m going to review it and see how it’s working.”
Do a little process. Sit down with your computer with a piece of paper, you journal, and look back and say, “How’s this working? How is it fitting in my life? Is it making my life better or is it making it worse? Am I able to fit this in or is it too much of a rush? Does having a morning ritual stressing me out, trying to pack all this in? Is it leaving me more tired than not? Can I add in more? Are certain pieces working or other pieces are not working?” By sitting down and designing the way your day starts because if you don’t do that, how do you start your day? I know a lot of people, they wake up, they reach over, they pick up their phone and they looked at their phone, and now you’re in the rabbit hole. Now you have lost control of your day. Now maybe you’re on email, you’re on social, you’re looking at your texts. You’re now letting someone else set the agenda for your day, setting the intentions for your day, setting what you’re not going to accomplish that day.
Once you start down that path, it’s hard to recover. What is this all about? This morning ritual is about putting you in the right frame of mind, in the right fit, the right emotional state so that you can create that intentional day. Then you string together a bunch of intentional days and you want to end up with an intentional life. Should that be exactly what my morning ritual looks like? That’s not what’s important. What’s important is you sit down and you plan how are you going to start your day. As I said, I got some hydration in there. I got meditation in there. Sometimes I’m journaling in there. Sometimes I’m doing some learning, some reading stuff and making my life better as opposed to reading Facebook or Instagram or something like that. Certainly, nutrition isn’t there. The last part of my morning ritual is usually food. Here’s another thing, if I missed, that’s okay. You get back on the habit the next day. If you missed it for a week, that’s okay. You just start again. You just come back in the practice.
That’s what this is about. It’s about starting, just like the meditation I spoke about earlier on. It’s about sitting down and being intentional. It’s about designing it and it’s about following that process. Then when you fall off the wagon, when you stop doing that, it’s coming back to the practice. That’s the key. One final thing is that sometimes, I’ll have different morning rituals for different days, like from a creative day, from my work out, from a day that I’m going to spend with the family. I have a different process. I have different morning rituals lined up for different types of days. That’s super advanced stuff. Just start with one morning ritual and just start super simple and be forgiving of yourself if you missed. It’s not perfect. If it ends up being a little wonky, that’s okay. It will get better over time.
One lucky audience that posts a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me in discovering your soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover the unique mind-body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45-minute consultation with me that is worth thousands. I’m going help you design a life that works so you are able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The more clear you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you step into your true potentials, stay on track, and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen? Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift, design it. Do what matters and join me each week as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams. I’m Dr. Sun. Join me next time on Your Life by Design.
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