by Shawn Fink | Feb 9, 2021 | Habits + Goal Setting, Recent, Well-Being + Mindfulness
Do you ever have to drag yourself out of bed? Do you wonder what the most energizing morning routine would be to start your day? Are you tired of waking up and grabbing your phone when you could be doing other things? Have you been frustrated that you don’t get up early enough to take time for yourself — or to work on a creative project or dream?
If you are nodding your head to any of those, it sounds like you need some super morning motivation to get out of bed and feel great about your day.
There are a lot of reasons why getting out of bed is hard for you. I could list any number of issues I’ve heard over the years from my clients who are trying to design more meaningful lives with impact and purpose. They tell me they get to bed too late or don’t get enough sleep. They share that they love how cozy their bed is on cold mornings.
But sometimes not wanting to get out of bed is a stress or trauma response to the stress or burnout you may be feeling in your life due to being unhappy at work or in a relationship or in your career.
I work with women on finding what I call Soul Alignment … which means we get to the root of what’s zapping your energy and motivation and help you realign so you can live a more fulfilling life of meaning, purpose and impact.
Mornings are often one of the best places to infuse the tools you need to bounce forward from all that stress. Even in the middle of a really hard moment we can use our morning habits to feel stronger and more in control of our lives.
I’ve have had a consistent and powerful morning routine for more than 10 years. This past year I tweaked it to be even more impactful for myself and I am a better mother and wife when I take that time for myself.
Lately, with the addition of a new puppy, I was reminded how hard it can be when life feels crazy to make yourself get up and do what needs to be done.
But I quickly learned, again, that getting up early and sticking to my morning routine is absolutely my top priority each day.
While I begin my day with meditation, yoga, coffee and writing, I also work in nearly all of these other habits as well. These are what help me show up for my early morning client calls with a smile and ready to support them.
10 Energizing Habits to Boost Your Morning Motivation
- Wake up early (at least 15 minutes before your family or before you have to start getting ready for work.)
- Drink a full glass of water
- Sit in silence or meditate in silence
- Move your body
- Plan Your Day
- Align with your purpose and life’s mission
- Tend to your wholeness.
- Express gratitude
- Journal
- Eat for your well-being
What energizing habit would you add to this list? Pick one or two and get started.
by Shawn Fink | Jan 5, 2021 | Habits + Goal Setting
Many of my private coaching clients hire me because they have big goals for themselves and they want to learn how to be more self-disciplined to reach them.
Being more disciplined is a highly sought after aspiration.
After all, we spend years establishing bad habits — starting in our teenage and college years — and then we spend the next half our life trying to undo any destructive patterns and behaviors.
And so when my clients aren’t as self-disciplined as they want to be, they often fall into a shame spiral thinking there is something wrong with them.
The shame spiral story says that because they didn’t do X Y or Z, they aren’t capable or able to make things happen for themselves.
- They need to be more self-disciplined, they say.
- They need more willpower, they think.
- They need to stop being so distracted, they say, frustratingly.
Often, though, that’s not actually their issue at all.
If learning how to be more disciplined is causing you a ton of frustration and to think negatively about yourself you might be doing it wrong.
My coaching work with women is rooted in the flow of feminine energy with a touch of strategic, masculine power.
What this means is that we work with YOUR energy, YOUR inner longings, YOUR spiritual needs AND your goals to create a path forward for you.
You don’t just set a new habit goal and go after it because you want it.
You cultivate it, step-by-step.
Habit formation is so much harder than it seems — because after years and years of following destructive patterns it’s hard to start something new or to make a change in your behavior.
Some women — free spirits — are not born to follow a rigid system.
As a creative, I totally get the free-spirit mindset.
And yet, as a creative soul, I’ve become one of the most self-disciplined people I know.
Over the past decade — especially in the past 2 years — I have created beautiful bookend routines with powerful, sacred rituals tucked inside for myself.
And I created my new habits through slow-building rhythms, routines and rituals.
As a coach, I would never ask you to FORCE anything on yourself that isn’t working.
A great example of this was a client that came to me because she wanted to follow her purpose and passion. But through her early coaching sessions she was focused mostly on losing weight and she got caught up in that narrative so much that she felt she couldn’t move forward with finding her passion until she looked better.
By the end of her coaching package, though, she learned to love herself regardless of what she looks like and she realized she’s not cut out to be a business owner … not yet anyway. Instead she found her joy, confidence and motivation in being more fit and healthy by waking up early for a new passion — riding horses.
The habit she wanted was to eat a strict diet but it never fit her, it never felt good.
The rhythm and routine she ended up finding was getting up early to ride horses.
The latter was chosen out of pure soul alignment.
Her health and well-being will follow her new rhythm.
You don’t need self-discipline, you need rhythms, routines & habits
The top ranking definition of self-discipline on Google is this: “the ability to control one’s feelings and overcome one’s weaknesses; the ability to pursue what one thinks is right despite temptations to abandon it.”
That’s a super harsh, masculine way to create change and get things done, don’t you think?
The truth is that habit formation works better when we adopt a Grow Forward approach, which we learn about in my Rise Stronger FREE Challenge.
Playful experimentation with rhythms, routines and habits has always been the best way for me to make a change in my life.
So let’s talk about what it means to have rhythms, routines & habits.
RHYTHMS
I believe strongly that the solutions to being more productive and making a bigger impact at home and at work is encouraging you to work with your feelings and emotions and to earn how to embrace them and use them to create rhythms in your many seasons of life.
According to Webster’s Dictionary, Rhythm “is movement, fluctuation, or variation marked by the regular recurrence or natural flow of related elements.”
And this is exactly what I work with my clients on to create their ideal days and weeks so that they make the impact in their life that they are longing for because they fully realize life is short and they have dreams to realize.
There is no shame in wanting to achieve things — after all pride is a positive emotion worth cultivating.
But how you go about achieving things is where most people get caught up.
When you lean into your cycles, seasons and rhythms, you will embrace goals from a place of flow rather than force. This uses a beautiful combination of doing and being.
ROUTINES
I’ve been inspiring women to build beautiful morning routines for the better part of the last decade.
I believe that the most game-changing impact move you can do for yourself is create a powerful, sacred routine to start and end your days.
Routines are different than rhythms because they operate on rituals that build on each other. Much like how it’s pretty common to shower, brush your hair and dry your hair, routines have a 1-2-3 pattern to them.
But first, before any routine can be built, you have to have the first step in the routine nailed down.
A good routine happens without needing to plan or think. It happens naturally, without force and without needing much of your energy to make it happen, One thing just flows into the next. You have many automatic routines in your day already.
An example is my bedtime routine. Once I get into bed, I put on my eye mask, write in my gratitude journal and my evening journal and then read a novel. I do this without thinking about it, without analyzing it or resisting it. It just happens every night like clockwork. My morning routine is also super ritualized but much longer in that it lasts an hour or longer.
HABITS
This is often what women want to form the most in their lives.
There are bad habits to stop. And positive habits to start.
A habit, by definition is: : “an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary.”
Involuntary is the secret power here.
When you get up and meditate each day without second guessing or resistance, then you’ve created a meditation habit.
You don’t need self-discipline, you need rhythms, routines & habits
When you put a few habits together, consecutively, that forms a routine.
When you put a couple routines together in your day, that creates a rhythm.
None of this is self-discipline.
It’s practice. It’s trial and error. It’s slow-building progress and it’s the only way to create momentum.
When I started a daily writing practice — finally — in 2020, it was only because of the two habits I had formed prior to that that made it possible for me. If I hadn’t already mastered my meditation and yoga habits, I know I would not have mastered the daily writing habit — a habit I had wanted to build in for years.
You must be patient with building rhythms, routines & habits
When we stop forcing ourselves to be more self-disciplined, we open ourselves up to grace and self-compassion.
Building new rhythms, routines and habits takes time and practice. You may encounter some setbacks from time to time.
That’s where being patient — and giving yourself grace — comes in and gives you the loving forgiveness you need. When you can finally let go of the force and hustle of habit formation, you will find flow and ease.
With my clients, we are almost always shifting and changing the direction of the rhythm and routines as they are building and growing because after experimentation you may find that it’s not working. It can take time to find the right flow and rhythm for you.
And that is my final piece of wisdom here … if you are trying and trying to build a new habit or routine and it’s not working that means it’s time to tweak things and try a new way.
WANT TO CREATE GOALS AND FIND CLARITY AND VISION FOR YOUR LIFE? If you would like to explore private coaching to help you create momentum and impact in your busy life, let’s chat about what you need to do differently. I offer a FREE Soul Clarity Session to any woman interested in exploring private coaching with me. Learn more here.
