How to Start Your Day the Right Way

Start your day the right way by selecting your thoughts for the day.

Elizabeth Gilbert–author of “Eat, Pray, Love”–writes the following: “You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day.” If you’re looking for a great way to improve your life, take Gilbert’s advice: choose your thoughts for the day just as you choose what you’re going to wear.

In this post I’m going to discuss two methods for doing this:

• The first of these methods is from the book “Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence”; and
• The second is from a YouTube video titled “Improve Your Life Using A Daily Success Routine – The Day Launcher System”.

Both of these methods are explained, in detail, below.

Feed Your Mind the Good Stuff

“What comes out of the mind is what you put in the mind. You must feed your mind like you feed your body.” – Norman Vincent Peale

The book “Today We Are Rich – Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence”, by Tim Sanders, presents seven principles for developing a confident outlook. The first of these principles is “Feed Your Mind the Good Stuff”. That is, you should be as careful about what you put into your mind as you are about what you put into your body. The process is the following:

• What you put into your mind determines your thoughts.
• Your thoughts determine your actions.
• Your actions determine your results.

Sanders describes his morning routine –which he created to ensure that he begins each day feeding his mind good stuff–in an interview with Robert Pagliarini. His morning routine is as follows:

•  Sanders begins each day by recollecting two people that he’s grateful for from the day before. He thinks of two people who did something good for him on the previous day.
• Then, he thinks of his upcoming day and of someone who’s going to be an asset to him on that day. He feels gratitude for that encounter ahead of time.
• Next, he puts on a cup of coffee and he reads something inspirational for half an hour.
• Finally, he sits down with another cup of coffee and he takes five minutes to rehearse the coming day, including any hurdles he thinks he might come across. He plans ahead of time how he’s going to overcome these hurdles. Sanders calls this “rehearsing his dance moves”.

In this way, Sanders makes sure that he begins each day by feeding his mind the good stuff. As an aside, if you’re looking for something inspirational to read each morning, a reader contacted me to let me know that she reads the following two posts from my blog each morning:

•  37 Tidbits of Higher Consciousness
• 45 Morsels of Wisdom From Earl Nightingale

You may want to start your morning by reading these two posts each day as well.

The Day Launcher System

Derek Franklin has a video up on YouTube in which he explains that you can improve your life by having a daily success routine. Derek indicates that a lot of people devote enormous amounts of time to reading self-improvement books and blog articles, as well as attending personal development seminars. However, they have very little to show for it. Derek adds that this is because they don’t change what they do on a daily basis. In addition, Derek adds the following:

1. Knowledge without action is virtually worthless.
2. Small things, done consistently, create huge results.

So how do you transform the knowledge that you’ve acquired into positive results? The answer is that you take action in small ways on a daily basis. And the best way to do this is by creating a Daily Success Routine. Derek indicates that the elements of a Daily Success Routine are the following:

• It exposes you on a daily basis to the ideal vision you have designed for your life.
• It reminds you of the principles and strategies that you want to live by.
• It puts you in a state where you think and feel in a powerful way.
• It pushes you to take action in small ways.

Derek explains that when he was trying to create his own “Daily Success Routine” he came across a book called “Work the System” by Sam Carpenter. That book helped him to understand that in order to see consistent, positive results in your life, you need to create and use systems. Systems give your brain all of the following:

• Clarity
• Order
• Structure
• A Sense of Belief that What You Want to Do, Can Be Done

Therefore, Derek decided to develop a system for his “Daily Success Routine”. Derek called the system that he came up with “The Day Launcher System”. It contains the following seven steps:

•  Step One: Calm Your Mind. You’re going to begin by clearing your mind of any thoughts that might be stressing you–such as unpaid bills, and argument you had with a co-worker the day before, a difficult conversation you need to have with your spouse, and so on. You want to calm your mind in order to be able to focus on the rest of the process.

•  Step Two: Express Your Thanks. Get your mind to focus on things that you have to be grateful for. This step will help you to move your attention away from what’s not working in your life, and toward what is working. In addition, it will help you to further calm your mind.

•  Step Three: Read Something Positive. You want to learn something new every day. This can be something that motivates you to act, something that teaches you a new skill, something that gives you a new perspective, and so on. By doing this you’ll be growing a little each day.

•  Step Four: Write Your Discoveries. Spend a few minutes writing about what you learned in the previous step. You can also write down any ideas that you may have on how you can apply some piece of knowledge that you’ve acquired, the steps that you can take to achieve a particular goal, or you can write about a specific action that you plan to take on that day in order to improve your life.

•  Step Five: Review Your Targets. Targets are things such as your mission statement, your goals, what your perfect day looks like, what you aspire to be, and so on. If you don’t review your targets on a regular basis you can lose track of what you want to do with your life. In addition, constantly reminding yourself of your targets will help you to move toward taking action in order to reach them.

•  Step Six: Watch Something Inspirational. Find a video online that moves you, and that makes you feel good, and watch it daily so that it will have an emotional impact on you.

•  Step Seven: Blast Off. When NASA launches a rocket, they have a term that they always use, such as “We have lift off”, or “Blast off”. When a sports team is about to go out and play a game, they usually huddle and chant a phrase such as “Go! Go! Go!” Think of a phrase that has emotional impact for you, which is going to push you into a positive state of taking action. Say it to yourself every morning.

As soon as you’re done with Step Seven, make sure that you begin to work right away on one of your high priority tasks. Instead of reading your email, watching the news, reading the paper, or going on Twitter, create something or produce something of value. That way, you start off your day by doing something of significance.

 Conclusion

How you start your day sets the tone for the next 24 hours. Furthermore, the quality of your days determines the quality of your life. Start your day the right way with the methods described above. Do you have a morning routine? How do you start your day?

Related Posts:

• Adopt Good Habits With Temptation Bundling
• Nine Morning Habits to Start The Day Right
• Eight Ways to Build to New Habits and Make Them Stick
• Seven Things To Stop Doing To Become An Early Riser