How to Start Your Day On a High Note
The way you start your day will have a profound impact on the quality of your life. Designing your life begins with designing your days. And how you spend the first hour of each day can have a big impact on your happiness, visible progress towards work that matters, and momentum. Fortunately, there are some really simple ways to start your day off on a high note
1.Power Questions
This is something that I learned from Tony Robbins Personal Power II program. Your brain will give you an answer to any question that you ask it, even if the answer has no basis in reality.
- If you ask yourself “why am I such an idiot?”, your brain will supply you with a list of answers that make you feel terrible about yourself.
- On the flip side, if you ask yourself “why am I so awesome?” your brain will supply you with answers that make you feel great about yourself
Purchase a set of spiral bound 3x5 index cards. On each card, write a question you want to ask yourself. Below are a few of my own power questions:
- What’s great about my life
- .What am I most proud of in our business
- What am I most happy about right now?
By starting each day with power questions, we prime our brains to focus on the positive aspects of our lives, and we kick off the day on a high note.
2. Read Something Uplifting and Inspiring
At the start of each day, our subconscious is most receptive to the seeds we plant. I always read before I write, not only because it helps with my own writing efforts, but it’s a way of priming my own brain for creative ideas. This is also one of the best ways to consistently come up with ideas for things to write about. By reading something uplifting and inspiring, we shift our focus, and what we focus on expands.
Pick a book that lights you up when you read it. Return to that book and read a passage from it each morning. Remember, that one of the hidden benefits of reading a book more than once is that the ideas get reinforced.
3. Start the day with Meaningful Work
If you can start your day by doing something meaningful, that momentum will carry your thought the rest of the day. Here are some simple parameters that might help:
- Don’t turn your devices on when you wake up
- Don’t go on the internet, check, email, or your favorite social network.
Fill the time with something meaningful.
- Try doing these 8 things that everyone should do before 8am recommended by Benjamin P. Hardy
4) Meditate or consider any one of these 5 habits for happiness.
If you want to live a meaningful life, start each day by doing meaningful work. And remember that as Alison E. Berman so brilliantly pointed out, there are no hacks to a meaningful life.
4. Dress for Success (even if you work from home)
When you work from home, it’s tempting to roll out of bed in your pajamas and stay in them until midday. One of the easiest ways to design an environment that is conducive to the person you want to become is to get dressed for work. Just the simple act of, getting dressed up, and putting on a nicer pair of shoes, completely changed the way I felt when I sat down to work. Your clothes are one of the 9 environments that make up your life, and the simple act of getting dressed is a way of upgrading that environment
As you start your days on a high note, your weeks, months, and years will eventually end on a high note.
Before You Go…
If doing the best work of your life is important to you, you’ll love my free guide: “Optimizing Productivity & Creativity.”
The tactics I’ve packed into this guide allowed me to write over 1 million words in the last 2 years. What could it do for your life’s work? Don’t miss it.
Like the article? Click the 💚 below to share with others on Medium.
