My Miracle Morning Monday

Productive Monday

I had a productive Monday today, my 5th week has got off to a good start.

Actually, I could have slept in today, because this week I have afternoon classes instead of 9am. But somehow I forgot about that last night and still set my alarm for half past seven as usual. Then I slept, and slept well. When I woke up, I stuck to my goal from yesterday of no longer pressing the snooze button. I've usually done this up to three times in the last few weeks, so I've always had 30 minutes less to get ready. But not today. I opened the balcony door straight away for some fresh air and sat up. Then I drank two cups of water and sat down.

And that's when I realised that school wouldn't start until just after one o'clock in the afternoon. I would have liked to just lie down again, but ‘unfortunately’ I also started the book ‘Miracle Morning’ yesterday, which is about doing six self-improvement tasks in the morning, within the first hour of waking up. And then I thought to myself, why not? The only difference was that I had a lot more time. But then I read a good 50 pages of the book to find out what I needed to do.

1. Reading

   Reading is one of the six tasks that author Hal Elrod suggests in his first lesson. Just 10 minutes is enough, and you read 12 books a year if you read at an average speed. I stopped after a good 40 pages today because I had the time and I was interested. So point one is already ticked off.

2. Meditate

   Elrod suggests taking 10 minutes every day to meditate in the morning. Even if you don't know what to think about at first and it seems difficult, the breathing slowly but surely calms you down. And with practice, you become more and more calm. I ticked that off straight away too. I set the timer for 10 minutes and then sat cross-legged with my eyes closed next to the open door to the balcony. I've meditated before, but I was also surprised when the alarm clock snapped me back into the real world after the time had passed. In a good mood, I continued with the third point.

3. Reflect

   I haven't yet reached the point in the book where I know the best order to tick off the tasks, but it seemed logical to me that I would now spend 10 minutes writing about how my days were yesterday, how I behaved, etc. I simply reflected a little and wrote down my thoughts. I simply reflected a little and took a bit more time for this too. I've already integrated this point into my life a lot, even if there are phases when I neglect it. But I also had a phase a few years ago where I reflected on 6 pages of words every day without taking a day off for six months. That totalled over half a million words, which is why I can say that it's worth it.

4. Visualise

   I had to look this point up again because I wasn't quite sure exactly what I was supposed to do. What questions should I ask myself and how should I go about it? I did a quick google search and watched two short tutorials on YouTube. As I understood it, you go through the things you want to achieve in your head. You imagine that you can do things and you imagine what the difficulties are. You visualise what life will be like when you have achieved these goals, but also, above all, what life will be like if you don't take care of it. Above all, visualising the difficulties that you are likely to encounter when working on the tasks should double the success rate of visualisation. And as a method, you can simply write these thoughts down. As I had my document with my reflections open anyway, I simply continued writing in it. And the 10 minutes were over in no time.

5. Self-affirmations

   Stand in front of the mirror and tell yourself the things you want to become, the things you are, etc. That's how I imagined it. You can do it that way, but I did some more googling and came to the realisation that you can also simply write this down. So you write down what you are, in your presence. But you say things that haven't happened yet. But you also simply say positive things to yourself, such as ‘I'm proud of myself’, ‘I'm ready for the day’, etc. Writing these things down wasn't that difficult, but writing down affirmations that hadn't even happened yet was a bit stranger: ‘I attract money and money comes to me in many different forms’ was an example sentence. I wrote that down and even though it wasn't true yet, it did something to my thinking because I developed mindfulness for this topic. Doing this every morning will definitely have a positive impact on you.

6. Sport

   Finally, I simply completed the last discipline of self-improvement. 10 minutes of sport every morning. I did this directly in my room and tried a HIIT workout. This is High Intensity Interval Training. 10 minutes is pretty short for that, but I was still out of breath by the end. And then it was already over.

It took me about 2 hours for my first ‘Miracle Morning’ and afterwards I thought to myself: ‘What now?’

But immediately afterwards I thought to myself that I could at least be productive until I went to school and then set about learning my Japanese vocabulary. Then I still had 25 minutes until I had to leave and I was already kind of exhausted and a bit tired. I thought to myself, what the heck, I'll have a quick nap and take a 20-minute power nap. Then it was off to school. I drank a lot throughout the day and I also realised that I was thirstier than usual. Afternoon lessons left me pretty exhausted, because normally my first energies of the day are channelled into lessons, but now it was my reserves. I finished school at half past four and was just as exhausted. I somehow realised that I was exhausted. I quickly did the weekly shop on the way home and arrived at my flat exhausted. At least I rewarded myself with two avocado sandwiches before doing my homework.

And then there was the daily blog article that I had to write. I didn't feel like it at all, but I knew that I would feel even less like it tonight and sat down. Now I've been sitting here writing this article for almost an hour, even though the first two minutes felt like an eternity. I just didn't know what to write about, but the answer was so obvious: I'll just describe my day!

Conclusion

I'll be honest, it's 8pm now and the only thing keeping me going is the idea that I'm going to reward myself with a film. If I want to do this morning a few times in a row, then I have to reward myself with a film every day, because otherwise the effort simply overwhelms me. But I really want to do this for a bit now, as one of my goals is ‘discipline’, because I need it to achieve my other goals. Today was a good start, even if it was quite exhausting. But now I'm rewarding myself with a nice film that I haven't seen yet, I'm thinking of: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly!

Until then ~