10-Step Morning Routine

Looking at your general environment, let\’s get more specific and look at how you start your day.

I\’ve mentioned before that I have routines in life that are unchanging day-to-day. The majority of them are in the morning because you win the day by winning the morning. 

When I wake up each day, I have a quiet place where I spend the first three to four hours of my day. 

It sounds like a lot, but it\’s not enough, honestly. 

In general terms, I get up before the sun rises in this environment and spend time centering myself through 10-steps.

For today\’s purposes, I am going to call it my power morning routine, even though I don\’t usually talk about it. Therefore, I don\’t have a name for it. So let\’s go with that.

Power Morning Routine

1. Bed
   1. Get up and make your bed! Doing so will immediately allow you to accomplish and check something off the list.
2. Ready
   1. Get fully ready for the day. Don\’t step out of bed and go downstairs to make breakfast, but get ready for the day so there\’s no temptation to lie back down.
3. Hydrate
   1. Drink 32 oz. of filtered water. I add half a lemon and sea salt to rehydrate myself, provide electrolytes, and rebalance my pH levels.
4. Replenish
   1. Make breakfast. I typically go for oatmeal with a super fruit like blueberries to give me nutrients to start the day off.
5. Caffeine
   1. Make your favorite drink to start your day. I used to drink coffee, but now I drink loose-leaf tea with oat milk. 
6. Goals
   1. Read and look through your goals. I will focus on my top 3 goals for the week and then reflect and journal.
7. Faith
   1. Take time to recenter your life before stepping into your day. Typically, I have time to sit down, meditate, read, pray, and center myself for the day. Doing this allows me to refocus on what matters to me.
8. Learn
   1. Take 30 minutes per day to read. It\’s important to me to go through about three books per month and 30 or more books per year to learn more constantly.
9. Creative
   1. Find a creative thing to work on! I work on building out, writing, reading, and researching for Margin and future blogs just like these. I also work on determining what I want Margin to look like and how I want it structured.
10. Mentor
    1. Be mentored and poured into by others. Find someone to walk through life with you and who can share their wisdom as well. Watching a daily Margin episode or reading one of these blogs can also help you continue to improve daily! Aside from being mentored, it\’s important for me to mentor others and have mentees and people I\’m walking through life with. I also find it helpful to have my family to bounce ideas off of and for them to be able to encourage and challenge me accordingly.

You may be looking at these 10-steps and be feeling overwhelmed. But I would encourage you not to give up because these 10-steps didn\’t come overnight for me. They were added periodically over time, and there are even specific steps that I haven\’t added in (and may not), like taking a cold shower first thing in the morning. I\’ve added other aspects like fitness into my routine for a later part of the day. 

Turn It Off

My morning routine has to be done with complete silence or white noise. No distractions. No phone. No email, Slack, texts, socials, you name it. None of that until my routine is complete. Otherwise, it throws off my focus.

There are several things that people, for the most part, don\’t enjoy doing. For you this may be working out, budgeting, reading, or maybe reflecting. So utilize this as an opportunity to do that thing, or things, first thing in the morning.

Complete the most challenging things first to get a boost of motivation going into the day. 

Determine The Change

So what needs to change in your morning routine to set yourself up in the best mindset? What needs to change to reduce your stress to start your morning off right? What do you need to adjust in your life, such as getting up before others do, to accomplish more in a day? What about your environment? Are there things around you that will get you in that mode of completing a routine every day before you officially start your day?

Call To Action

Write a list of 5-morning routines you want to have. Add the first into your routine this month, the second into the next, the third into the following month, and so on. Doing this will allow you to build a positive habit each month that won\’t be too much too quickly, preventing you from quitting.

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