Morning Habits for Success

“Our levels of success will rarely exceed our level of personal development, because success is something we attract by who we become.”

– Jim Rohn

Here are six timeless personal development habits complied by Hal Elrod, if performed every morning, will create ‘miraculous’ changes in your life:

Silence

If you want to immediately reduce your stress levels, to begin each day with the kind of calm, clarity, and peace of mind that will allow you to stay focused on what’s most important in your life, and even dance on the edge of enlightenment—do the opposite of what most people do—start every morning with a period of purposeful Silence.

Instead of checking your phone and seeing what’s happening in the world, check in with yourself by starting the day with a period of mindfulness. When you start the morning with either seated or walking mediation, you establish a calm and peaceful reference point for
the remainder of the day. Think of your morning meditation like lighting an internal candle you use to find peace of mind during a noisy and chaotic day.

I was a skeptic about meditating, may be due to its religious roots. But I was hooked, once I experienced the Mindfulness Meditation with Jack Canfield. Just 5 Mins of this small exercise, where you try to focus your attention on the breathing, will bring your energies to the present and rid you off worries and fears. Gratitude Meditation is also helpful, and helps you speeden your manifestation.

Affirmations

“It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. Once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.”

‐ Muhammed Ali

Daily affirmations are to the mind what exercise is to the body. Repeating affirmations helps to reprogram the subconscious mind for success. It helps eliminate negative and limiting beliefs and transforms your comfort zone from a limited one keeping you trapped in mediocrity to a more expanded one where anything is possible. It helps to replace your “I cant’s” with “I cans,” and your fears and doubts with confidence and certainty.

Whether you know it or not, you are always using affirmations… but usually not ones that will bring you what you want. Like, “I am never Good Enough”, “Bad things always happens to me”

The daily use of positive affirmations interrupts and eventually totally replaces this barrage of negative thoughts and beliefs. To achieve this, you must continually flood your subconscious with thoughts and images of the new reality you wish to create. Affirmations are reminders to your unconscious mind to stay focused on your goals and to come up with solutions to challenges and obstacles that might get in the way.

Consider a transformation you want to make and phrase it as, “I [your name] will be [transformation].”

Here are the eight guidelines for creating effective affirming statements. These are derived from the book The Success Principles.

1. Start with the words “I am.” These are the two most powerful words in the English language.
2. Use the present tense. Ex: “I am Happy, Now that I can drive my car well”
3. State it in the positive. Affirm what you want, not what you don’t want. Ex: Affirm “I am a good driver“, Not “I will not hit my car to the curb”
4. Keep it brief.
5. Make it specific.
6. Include an action word ending with –ing.
7. Include at least one dynamic emotion or feeling word.
8. Make affirmations for yourself, not others.

Repeat your affirmation out loud with intense conviction. Affirmation forms belief; belief leads to action; action leads to progress; progress strengthens belief.

Visualizing

“You must expect great things from yourself before you can do them.”

‐ Michael Jordan

Using visualization techniques to focus on your goals and desires yields four very important benefits.

1.) It activates your creative subconscious which will start generating creative ideas to achieve your goal.

2.) It programs your brain to more readily perceive and recognize the resources you will need to achieve your dreams.

3.) It activates the law of attraction, thereby drawing into your life the people, resources, and circumstances you will need to achieve your goals.

4.) It builds your internal motivation to take the necessary actions to achieve your dreams.

Visualization is really quite simple. You sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes and imagine — in as vivid detail as you can — what you would be looking at if the dream you have were already realized. Imagine being inside of yourself, looking out through your eyes at the ideal result.

Be like the Olympic downhill skier who imagines going down the mountain, executing each turn perfectly. Visualize yourself executing the work you need to do today to become the person you aspire to be. When see yourself executing a task in your mind’s eye you make the task easier to execute later in the day, because visualization fires and strengthens the same neural circuits you’ll use to complete the task.

Although a daily practice of visualization is vital, we don’t need to spend all day thinking about our goals for this technique to work. In fact, spending too much time in visualization can rob you of something essential – living in the moment. Daily rituals help to establish the right balance between thinking about the future and living in the moment. Start by picking a time during which you’ll review your goals and visualize your success. Ideally, do this twice a day – first thing in the morning and right before you go to bed. The process typically will take 10 minutes or less.

If you meditate, guided or not, do your visualizations immediately after your meditation. The deepened state reached during meditation heightens the impact of visualization. For greatest effect, read your goals or affirmations out loud. After each one, close your eyes and create the visual image of the completed goal in your mind. To multiply the effects, add sound, smells, and tastes. Most importantly, add the emotions and bodily sensations you would be feeling if you had already achieved your goal. This is a powerful visualization technique.

Research has revealed that images or scenes that are accompanied by intense emotion will stay locked in our memory forever. The more passion, excitement and energy we muster during visualization, the more powerful the results will be. Once you have visualized each goal as complete, it’s time to release. Let go of your goals, and spend the rest of your day being in the present moment.

Exercising

I cannot stress enough on the benefits of exercising. Not long ago, I too was a couch potato, and never in my life had experienced the bliss of sweat. When you increase your heart rate with aerobic exercise, you trigger the release of neurochemicals (dopamine, norepinephrine, and BDNF), which significantly increases your ability to focus during the day. John Ratey, a researcher at Harvard Medical Schools, says, “A dose of exercise is like taking a bit of Ritalin.”
You dont have to do reps of crunches to get this benefit, although it has its own advantages. Just a 20 Min Brisk walk, or even few minutes skipping the rope will do the trick.

Since I have already written much about physical wellness, and also there are plenty of materials available regarding the same, lets move on to the next point.

“In order for man to succeed in life, he is provided with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these two means, man can attain perfection.”

‐ Plato

Reading

After purposeful silence, affirmations, visualisation, and exercise, your brain is hungry to learn – pick up a personal improvement book and start reading!
Whatever area of life you want to improve (relationships, health, finances, happiness), there is a book to guide you.
Books are the richest source of high‐quality, curated knowledge. Skim a book every morning to find one big idea that may advance your life.

Many of you already know that I spend a considerable amount of my time reading and writing. Honestly, it is one of the things I love doing the most. Last year I read 63 books. I didn’t actually try to read that amount. I was just reading. I honestly felt like I was not reading enough. Then I checked my Kindle and it told me I had purchased 71 Books and have completed 63 out of it. This year I decided that I’d be intentional about my reading time and spend a lot of time deliberately reading.

Scribing

Ever wondered why history’s great minds including Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Andy Warhol, Leonardo Da Vinci, Marcus Aurelius, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw and Maya Angelou would spend so much of their precious time writing things that will never be seen by another soul?

Many famous creatives, writers, innovators and original thinkers of our generation keep journals— for many, it is a creative necessity, for others, a place for exploration, and for some an art form in and of itself. “Writing accesses your left hemisphere of the brain, which is analytical and rational,” says Maud Purcell, a psychotherapist and journaling expert. “While your left brain is occupied, your right brain is free to do what it does best, i.e. create, intuit and feel. In this way, writing removes mental blocks and allows us to use more of our brainpower to better understand ourselves and the world around us.”

https://www.wikihow.com/Keep-a-Journal