Magical Mornings – How to Get More Done Before Breakfast
There is something special about waking up early each day.
It is a secret sauce for getting a heck of a lot more done in life.
Almost 3 weeks ago I decided to change my daily schedule by waking up at 4am each day.
4am you say?!
You bet!
Let me tell you how to do it shortly.
But first, let me quickly tell you why I have chosen to do this.
Why wake up so early?
There are literally zero distractions. Your willpower is at its highest. You can focus 100 percent on whatever your biggest goal in life is.
Think about this:
If you were to wake up at 4am each day and get in 3 hours of deep, focused, work before most people wake up at around 7am, that totals 21 hours of work a week, 82 hours of work a month, and over 1,000 hours of work for the year.
1,000 hours of focused, deep work a year is equal to 125x 8hour working days… but these are not your typical 8hr working days with interruptions, meetings, and breaks. These are 8 hours of FOCUSED, DEEP WORK on your most important goals.
Taking it a step further, 125x 8 hr working days is equal to working full-time, in a deep and focused state on your most important goals for 25 weeks of the year! That is just shy of 6 months.
It is crazy how these numbers stack up.
And all it takes it simply waking up earlier and getting focused on what matters most and being consistent with it.
Does it really work?
Most definitely!
In the last three weeks I have:
- Completely updated my Change Your Life program.
- Ran a Flash Sale for you guys.
- Overhauled my website – new theme, new homepage, mostly a lot of backend and design elements that will make things simpler moving forward (check it out if interested and tell me what you think).
- Created a side hustle which I have been hustling on for the last couple of weeks (unfortunately it is not going as well as I had planned… I rapidly launched this to test the idea and so far, it is a slow start).
- Created two other multi-page websites (fully designed and complete) as part of the new side hustle.
- Got more exercise in… being able to go for a walk or a bicycle ride at 5am while the sun is rising is incredibly special… there is something about it that is magical.
- Read 3 books… although this one is because I have changed my night-time routine (to help me start effectively with my morning).
Just writing the above makes me feel in awe of this process. It is simply amazing the output that can be created when this time stacks up each day.
But it is not as simple as it sounds… mostly because I have three young children between the ages of 1 and 5. So, as any parent would understand, trying to stick to a schedule is incredibly hard!
The mornings are the easy part because everyone is sleeping. The hardest part is getting to sleep on time.
I need at LEAST 8 hours of sleep each night to perform at my best. So, to wake up at 4am means getting to bed no later than 8pm. But even then, it is impossible to get a full 8 hours of sleep in because my kids are always waking up each night. I have not had a full-night’s sleep for 5 years now, except for the odd occasion when I am away for business travel. Any parents with young children reading this know exactly what I am talking about!
Here is the reality.
I have only actually woken up at 4am twice during this time (well, one time I got up at 3:57am which was ever better).
To get an 8 hour sleep I really need “bed time” of 8.5 hours, and preferably 9 hours.
Getting to bed at 8pm is tricky. My kids are often still mucking around until 8pm, or sometimes even 8:30pm!
And then there is that time I used to spend with my wife – after the kids are sleep and before our own sleep. This was our quality time together. Going to bed at 8pm took this way.
As a result, I have been tweaking my strategy over the past few weeks and my typical day now looks like:
- Bed-time between 8:30pm and 9pm
- Awake at 5:30am.
So, my goal of 4am has only been achieved twice. But that’s ok, because every other day over the past 3 weeks I have been up by 6am at the very latest.
This has given me at least one hour every day, and probably about 1 hour and 45minutes on average over the past 3 weeks to really focus deeply on these goals.
Even just 1 hour of deep, focused, work a day, will tally up to 45 rock solid 8 hr days with no breaks, which tallies 2 and a half months of full-time work a year. And again, this is time purely on deep, focused, work. Incredible!
How do you do it?
I found it quite simple.
You simply set a strict rule for yourself in terms of your bedtime and wake up time.
Make sure you push all your bed-time rituals forward to meet your deadline. ie, stop drinking caffeine earlier in the day, stop all your screen time earlier than usual, eat earlier if need be, and so forth.
The main thing is to really internalise the benefits of doing this. The primary benefit being that you will get undistracted, highly focused work done on your most important goals in life. Whether that is working on a big project at work, perhaps it is doing your side hustle, or perhaps it is writing your book, or perhaps it is getting your daily exercise in.
Whatever it is, you need to internalise the benefit of doing this and achieving it.
The other thing is to plan the night before what you will do in the morning.
You do not want to wake up, hit your desk, and then use your willpower and waste time trying to figure out what you are going to do.
Instead, have it planned… know exactly what you are going to do.
Perhaps its that you will write 1,000 words of your book, or that you are going to go for a bicycle ride through the park, or that you are going to research a certain topic.
Having it planned means that within five minutes of waking up, you are focused and doing productive work.
My first 3 weeks have been amazing.
The challenge for me now is to keep this up. I have no intention of stopping this.
I challenge you to experience the magic of the mornings.
This is the time you can really change your life, by working at it every single day.
When you win your mornings, you win the day.
Are you with me?
Brendan
The post Magical Mornings – How to Get More Done Before Breakfast appeared first on The Start of Happiness.
What Job Roles Can One Gain by Clearing Cisco 300-415 ENSDWI Certification Exam?
by Scott Wolf Want career enhancement but don’t know in which direction to take the next step? Why not then have a close look at the Cisco 300-415 ENSDWI exam that in the short run can qualify you for two prominent certificates. In particular, they are the Cisco Certified Specialist – Enterprise SD-WAN Implementation and…
The post What Job Roles Can One Gain by Clearing Cisco 300-415 ENSDWI Certification Exam? first appeared on Self Help Daily.
Magical Mornings – How to Get More Done Before Breakfast
There is something special about waking up early each day.
It is a secret sauce for getting a heck of a lot more done in life.
Almost 3 weeks ago I decided to change my daily schedule by waking up at 4am each day.
4am you say?!
You bet!
Let me tell you how to do it shortly.
But first, let me quickly tell you why I have chosen to do this.
Why wake up so early?
There are literally zero distractions. Your willpower is at its highest. You can focus 100 percent on whatever your biggest goal in life is.
Think about this:
If you were to wake up at 4am each day and get in 3 hours of deep, focused, work before most people wake up at around 7am, that totals 21 hours of work a week, 82 hours of work a month, and over 1,000 hours of work for the year.
1,000 hours of focused, deep work a year is equal to 125x 8hour working days… but these are not your typical 8hr working days with interruptions, meetings, and breaks. These are 8 hours of FOCUSED, DEEP WORK on your most important goals.
Taking it a step further, 125x 8 hr working days is equal to working full-time, in a deep and focused state on your most important goals for 25 weeks of the year! That is just shy of 6 months.
It is crazy how these numbers stack up.
And all it takes it simply waking up earlier and getting focused on what matters most and being consistent with it.
Does it really work?
Most definitely!
In the last three weeks I have:
- Completely updated my Change Your Life program.
- Ran a Flash Sale for you guys.
- Overhauled my website – new theme, new homepage, mostly a lot of backend and design elements that will make things simpler moving forward (check it out if interested and tell me what you think).
- Created a side hustle which I have been hustling on for the last couple of weeks (unfortunately it is not going as well as I had planned… I rapidly launched this to test the idea and so far, it is a slow start).
- Created two other multi-page websites (fully designed and complete) as part of the new side hustle.
- Got more exercise in… being able to go for a walk or a bicycle ride at 5am while the sun is rising is incredibly special… there is something about it that is magical.
- Read 3 books… although this one is because I have changed my night-time routine (to help me start effectively with my morning).
Just writing the above makes me feel in awe of this process. It is simply amazing the output that can be created when this time stacks up each day.
But it is not as simple as it sounds… mostly because I have three young children between the ages of 1 and 5. So, as any parent would understand, trying to stick to a schedule is incredibly hard!
The mornings are the easy part because everyone is sleeping. The hardest part is getting to sleep on time.
I need at LEAST 8 hours of sleep each night to perform at my best. So, to wake up at 4am means getting to bed no later than 8pm. But even then, it is impossible to get a full 8 hours of sleep in because my kids are always waking up each night. I have not had a full-night’s sleep for 5 years now, except for the odd occasion when I am away for business travel. Any parents with young children reading this know exactly what I am talking about!
Here is the reality.
I have only actually woken up at 4am twice during this time (well, one time I got up at 3:57am which was ever better).
To get an 8 hour sleep I really need “bed time” of 8.5 hours, and preferably 9 hours.
Getting to bed at 8pm is tricky. My kids are often still mucking around until 8pm, or sometimes even 8:30pm!
And then there is that time I used to spend with my wife – after the kids are sleep and before our own sleep. This was our quality time together. Going to bed at 8pm took this way.
As a result, I have been tweaking my strategy over the past few weeks and my typical day now looks like:
- Bed-time between 8:30pm and 9pm
- Awake at 5:30am.
So, my goal of 4am has only been achieved twice. But that’s ok, because every other day over the past 3 weeks I have been up by 6am at the very latest.
This has given me at least one hour every day, and probably about 1 hour and 45minutes on average over the past 3 weeks to really focus deeply on these goals.
Even just 1 hour of deep, focused, work a day, will tally up to 45 rock solid 8 hr days with no breaks, which tallies 2 and a half months of full-time work a year. And again, this is time purely on deep, focused, work. Incredible!
How do you do it?
I found it quite simple.
You simply set a strict rule for yourself in terms of your bedtime and wake up time.
Make sure you push all your bed-time rituals forward to meet your deadline. ie, stop drinking caffeine earlier in the day, stop all your screen time earlier than usual, eat earlier if need be, and so forth.
The main thing is to really internalise the benefits of doing this. The primary benefit being that you will get undistracted, highly focused work done on your most important goals in life. Whether that is working on a big project at work, perhaps it is doing your side hustle, or perhaps it is writing your book, or perhaps it is getting your daily exercise in.
Whatever it is, you need to internalise the benefit of doing this and achieving it.
The other thing is to plan the night before what you will do in the morning.
You do not want to wake up, hit your desk, and then use your willpower and waste time trying to figure out what you are going to do.
Instead, have it planned… know exactly what you are going to do.
Perhaps its that you will write 1,000 words of your book, or that you are going to go for a bicycle ride through the park, or that you are going to research a certain topic.
Having it planned means that within five minutes of waking up, you are focused and doing productive work.
My first 3 weeks have been amazing.
The challenge for me now is to keep this up. I have no intention of stopping this.
I challenge you to experience the magic of the mornings.
This is the time you can really change your life, by working at it every single day.
When you win your mornings, you win the day.
Are you with me?
Brendan
The post Magical Mornings – How to Get More Done Before Breakfast appeared first on The Start of Happiness.
Improve Your Mental Health With Simple Changes in Your Home or Workspace (Infographic)
Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid Think about one of your favorite movies for a minute. For me, Casablanca comes to mind (as one may expect from someone who is obsessed with old Hollywood!). Casablanca is comprised of an outstanding cast bringing colorful roles to life. Rick, Ilsa, Victor, Captain Louis Renault,…
The post Improve Your Mental Health With Simple Changes in Your Home or Workspace (Infographic) first appeared on Self Help Daily.
EFT Tapping: Why Focus and Tap Through Your Negative Feelings
I’d like to address the very common concern about tapping through negative feelings while using EFT tapping.
Recently someone who has viewed my EFT tapping videos wrote to me and shared that she did not enjoy the experience of tapping her negative feelings. If she has a choice, she would prefer to tap and just use positive affirmations. In fact, she reported how nice she felt while tapping through the positive statements along with my video.
Well, she wouldn’t need to tap through any negative feelings if it is indeed true that she had none. Hopefully she is not in denial of any actual negative feelings. May I concede that many of us are not comfortable with bring attention to our negative emotions. In fact, I used to have the same resistance myself.
When I was first introduced to EFT tapping, I was afraid that I would be reinforcing the negatives. I was concerned that I would start to feel worse with bringing attention to my negative feelings. It felt like a counter-intuitive thing to do when I was desperately trying to feel better.
Why Bring Attention to Our Negative Emotional Story When Doing EFT Tapping
Well, there are reasons why we would want to bring attention to the negatives. Here’s a simple analogy that can make things easier to understand.
Say for instance, you are having pain in your stomach.
Your pain got so bad that you have to pay a visit to your doctor.
In the consultation room, your doctor asks, “what are you feeling and where is this pain?”
How would you respond?
Would you be telling the doctor, “I don’t want to be talking about my pain and I don’t want to bring attention to where the pain is. Let’s just talk about how my ideal life is going to be like.”
In all likelihood, no.
You are probably going to describe what your problem is and where the pain in your body is.
See my point? The doctor has to know what is your issue in order to help you overcome it.
It is the same way when we do EFT Tapping.
The protocol for EFT tapping is designed to help us release emotional stress or pain.
When The Power of Positive Thinking Fail to Work
Is it even possible to forget about using EFT but use the power of positive thinking in order to achieve what we want?
Well, it doesn’t work for everyone.
In fact, when we don’t address what we truly think and feel, these negative emotions and thoughts are still in our subconscious. They don’t just disappear. Thus, they could be in the way of our well-being and success.
We can attempt to “will” (or force) our minds to think positively but the mind often works with a negative bias. These negative emotions sabotages our best effort. It is like we are carrying a ton of weight (our emotional baggage) even as we try to scale a mountain to reach the top (where our goal or dream is). The ton of weight slows down our progress. We add unnecessary struggle to ourselves.
Society emphasises positive thinking, and does not emphasise enough on processing our negative emotions.
From an early age, we have been taught not to cry and to put on a strong front. We have been encouraged to look on the positive life, be optimistic, be grateful for what we have and find the silver lining behind the clouds.As a result, we rarely acknowledge our hurt, grief or traumas adequately. Over time, we build a huge backlog of unprocessed negative emotions.
How EFT Tapping Prevents Emotional Bypassing
Fortunately, EFT tapping sessions offer an excellent opportunity for us to work through this backlog.
With EFT tapping, we start by identifying what the problem is. We acknowledge how we feel and we bring attention to the intensity, location and the sensation that we are experiencing in our body. As we apply the tapping action using a light pressure with our fingertips on specific meridian points on our face and body, a neurotransmitter is being sent to the brain. It is when the negative emotional charge gets released.
What’s Key: It will be great if we can allow ourselves enough time to work through our negative emotions before tapping using positive affirmations.
If we tap using positive affirmations too quickly, we short-circuit the natural process of letting go, releasing and then moving on.
How we can tell whether we have done adequate releasing work or not is via using the intensity score. We assess the intensity to what we feel at the beginning of the tapping session and after applying tapping rounds, we check in again to determine what the score is. If the score has come down to a 3 or below (out of a level 10 intensity), we can safely assume that we are ready to apply some positive reframes or affirmations.
In a nutshell…
EFT sessions (done properly) prevent the problem of emotional bypassing.
Finally, we like to end off an EFT tapping session on a more relaxed/or positive state. We do this through tapping and verbalising positive reframes and affirmations at the same time. It is a nice way to center ourselves in a better way forward while feeling more at ease, relaxed and free from our emotional stress.
Hope my explanation helps. Let me know if you have more questions, I’d be glad to assist. Subscribe for updates and articles on EFT tapping, Self-Love and Manifesting Abundance. I wish you much success in your tapping sessions.
Love and abundance always,
Evelyn Lim
Certified Advanced EFT Practitioner
Abundance Coach
The post EFT Tapping: Why Focus and Tap Through Your Negative Feelings appeared first on Abundance Coach for Women in Business | Evelyn Lim.
Emotional Reasons Behind Your Physical Illness: An Introduction
“There is no illness of the body apart from the mind.” Socrates, philosopher
Negative emotions such as anger, pain, fear, sadness, anxiety and so on are electrical charges that cause blockages along your meridian pathways. Your body’s natural energy flow gets disrupted as a result. Luckily there are ways to restore your body back into balance. (This article is republished to update graphics and links – Sep 2021).
To begin with, suppressing negative emotions are not helpful. They prevent free and easy flow of energy movement. Essentially, emotion is energy in motion. Emotional energy has to be expressed outwards – in other words, to be released – rather than kept inwards.
Hiding or avoidance of your emotional issues does not make them go away. In fact, they could cause you to be in self-sabotage. Thus, despite your best intentions, you may not even realize that the emotional reasons could be behind your physical illnesses or inability to attain your goals.
When you store negative emotions, you are redirecting energy that can be used for vital functioning of the body. Negative emotions cause energy leakages. You tax your liver, adrenal glands and heart, etc. Over time, you compromise your immune system.
One interesting study is the connection between gut health and your mood. Have you noticed that whenever you feel disgust, you generally feel it strongly in the gut? Disgust is an emotion that is reportedly experienced by many people in depression.
The connection between gut health and mood has become so clear that scientists are now starting to consider recommending probiotics as an alternative to anti-depressant drugs. There’s also a increasing evidence to indicate an intestinal link to a variety of neurological diseases. What can the takeaways be from this? Well, consider adding yoghurt or naturally fermented food to your diet and working on emotional management, instead of relying on medication.
What Metaphysical Experts Say
The body-mind connection has been well studied by the Chinese or Greeks since thousands of years ago. Hence, this is nothing new.
In the modern world, Candice Pert, Louise Hay, and Bruce Lipton PhD are pioneers in the metaphysical study. They draw on modern psychology to also explain the emotional reasons behind your physical illnesses. Here is what they have to say….
Candice Pert PHD
In her best-known book, Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine published in 1997, Dr. Pert who has since passed on in 2013, advocated a more holistic approach to understanding health.
“I’ve come to believe that virtually all illness, if not psychosomatic in foundation, has a definite psychosomatic component,” she wrote. The “molecules of emotion,” she argued, “run every system in our body,” creating a “bodymind’s intelligence” that is “wise enough to seek wellness” without a great deal of high-tech medical intervention.
Louise Hay
If you are new to healing, Louise Hay’s work is a great place to start.
In her book You can Heal Your Life, she outlined thought patterns that could possibly be behind your physical symptoms. Louise has a list of positive affirmations for illnesses and diseases for healing. While there are critics saying that her book afflicts guilt for any ill health, I have doubts that this is her intent. Louise shared what has worked for her and her findings through research study. I believe that what she was trying to impart is to undertake personal responsibility when it comes to healing.
Her book serves as a great guide to understand the mind-body-emotion connection.
“Every thought we think is creating our future. ” Louise Hay
Dr Bruce Lipton
Dr Bruce Lipton, in his groundbreaking book The Biology of Belief shares the following….
The power of your own thoughts can affect the expression of your genes — and even potentially heal cancer and other diseases.
He shares how cancer genes can predispose a person towards cancer, but it does not necessarily mean a person will get cancer. In fact, whether or not a person gets cancer depends on his or her beliefs.
“We are not victims of our genes, but masters of our fates, able to create lives overflowing with peace, happiness, and love.” Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief
Here is an info-graphic that explains the physical-emotional link simply …
What’s next? Where do you even begin to start?
I have been interested in natural therapies or solutions for more than 10 years now.
In the beginning, I was very skeptical. However, I was interested enough to find out more about what can truly solve my eczema skin issues. I was also constantly ill due to a lowered immune system back then. Let’s just say that I was left with little choice, except to seek for alternative/complementary remedies.
My journey turned out to be an exciting one. I was introduced to the works of Dr Bruce Lipton, Louise Hay and many other experts more than 10 years ago. In order to find out more, my husband and I bought their tapes and books. All in all, we must have spent easily more than US$10K in our education on holistic health. Luckily, with so much information now online, you can spend a lot less.
Hence, I would like to suggest to anyone who would like to start on a metaphysical journey to begin from where you are. if you are having some physical illness, investigate into what is truly bothering you. Notwithstanding, I would like to share the solutions that I believe are great for addressing Metaphysical or Emotional Reasons Behind Physical Illnesses.
5 Natural Solutions to Resolve Negative Emotions Behind Physical Illnesses
1) Mindfulness Practice
A mindfulness practice allows you to become aware of the negative emotions that you have and to let them go. Thus, you are able to process and release the energies that are stuck in your body. You are led into a state of peace and calm.
2) Essential Oils
Essential oils, when used with intention, can aid in emotional release.
I would like to summarise and share what Carolyn Mein says in her book, Releasing Emotional Patterns with Essential Oils…
* The emotional energy from the trauma enters the body. If not released, it is stored in an organ or gland with the same vibrational energy. Eg. anger is stored in liver.
* Memory of the trauma gets stored in the limbic brain.
* Our minds create a belief and attach it to the emotional memory.
* Emotional response to the trauma gets stored in the cellular memory throughout the body & becomes automatic.
Essential oils help to lift our energy vibrations. They reconnect us with nature. We are using Mother Earth to heal our imbalances. Not all essential oils are the same. Get therapeutic-grade essential oils here!
3) Meridian or EFT Tapping
Well, if you don’t already know Meridian or EFT tapping (Emotional Freedom Technique), it may be that you are first time at my site.
Meridian or EFT tapping is a technique that I highly recommend for stress reduction. Meridian tapping involves using the finger tips to tap on specific meridian points on the face and body, to neutralise negative emotions. The meridian points that we tap on also corresponds to where our major emotional blocks typically are.
The wonderful thing that I had discovered is that we can combine EFT tapping, mindfulness and essential oils for improved results. We work with release statements, setting intentions and reprograming of beliefs and affirmations at the cellular level for integrated healing.
Need some help to determine the emotional reason behind your physical ailments? Apply for a discovery call with me. As a student of mind-body-emotions study, I will be very interested to explore some possible answers with you.
Restore Balance with a Metaphysical Approach to Healing Physical Illness
Negative emotions are nothing bad. They offer feedback. They highlight the areas that we need to make a shift in.
It is only when we do nothing about them that problems result.
You are addressing the root causes of your physical illnesses when you investigate into metaphysical reasons behind them. An investigation leads you into embracing the part of you that has stuck energies. You give yourself the space for release and to process what is holding you back.
Please be aware that especially in the case of serious illnesses, a multi-pronged approach for recovery may be required. Chances are that you will need to look into making some lifestyle changes – diet, exercise and so on. An integration at all levels – physical, emotional, mental, spiritual – brings about wellness ultimately.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, can I enlist your assistance to share it on your favourite social media platforms?
Love and abundance always,
Evelyn Lim
Abundance Coach
P.S. I have got a lot more to share about metaphysical health. It is just impossible to cover everything in an article. Would you like me to cover more in future articles? Please share your thoughts in the comment box below.
The post Emotional Reasons Behind Your Physical Illness: An Introduction appeared first on Abundance Coach for Women in Business | Evelyn Lim.
Magical Mornings – How to Get More Done Before Breakfast
There is something special about waking up early each day.
It is a secret sauce for getting a heck of a lot more done in life.
Almost 3 weeks ago I decided to change my daily schedule by waking up at 4am each day.
4am you say?!
You bet!
Let me tell you how to do it shortly.
But first, let me quickly tell you why I have chosen to do this.
Why wake up so early?
There are literally zero distractions. Your willpower is at its highest. You can focus 100 percent on whatever your biggest goal in life is.
Think about this:
If you were to wake up at 4am each day and get in 3 hours of deep, focused, work before most people wake up at around 7am, that totals 21 hours of work a week, 82 hours of work a month, and over 1,000 hours of work for the year.
1,000 hours of focused, deep work a year is equal to 125x 8hour working days… but these are not your typical 8hr working days with interruptions, meetings, and breaks. These are 8 hours of FOCUSED, DEEP WORK on your most important goals.
Taking it a step further, 125x 8 hr working days is equal to working full-time, in a deep and focused state on your most important goals for 25 weeks of the year! That is just shy of 6 months.
It is crazy how these numbers stack up.
And all it takes it simply waking up earlier and getting focused on what matters most and being consistent with it.
Does it really work?
Most definitely!
In the last three weeks I have:
- Completely updated my Change Your Life program.
- Ran a Flash Sale for you guys.
- Overhauled my website – new theme, new homepage, mostly a lot of backend and design elements that will make things simpler moving forward (check it out if interested and tell me what you think).
- Created a side hustle which I have been hustling on for the last couple of weeks (unfortunately it is not going as well as I had planned… I rapidly launched this to test the idea and so far, it is a slow start).
- Created two other multi-page websites (fully designed and complete) as part of the new side hustle.
- Got more exercise in… being able to go for a walk or a bicycle ride at 5am while the sun is rising is incredibly special… there is something about it that is magical.
- Read 3 books… although this one is because I have changed my night-time routine (to help me start effectively with my morning).
Just writing the above makes me feel in awe of this process. It is simply amazing the output that can be created when this time stacks up each day.
But it is not as simple as it sounds… mostly because I have three young children between the ages of 1 and 5. So, as any parent would understand, trying to stick to a schedule is incredibly hard!
The mornings are the easy part because everyone is sleeping. The hardest part is getting to sleep on time.
I need at LEAST 8 hours of sleep each night to perform at my best. So, to wake up at 4am means getting to bed no later than 8pm. But even then, it is impossible to get a full 8 hours of sleep in because my kids are always waking up each night. I have not had a full-night’s sleep for 5 years now, except for the odd occasion when I am away for business travel. Any parents with young children reading this know exactly what I am talking about!
Here is the reality.
I have only actually woken up at 4am twice during this time (well, one time I got up at 3:57am which was ever better).
To get an 8 hour sleep I really need “bed time” of 8.5 hours, and preferably 9 hours.
Getting to bed at 8pm is tricky. My kids are often still mucking around until 8pm, or sometimes even 8:30pm!
And then there is that time I used to spend with my wife – after the kids are sleep and before our own sleep. This was our quality time together. Going to bed at 8pm took this way.
As a result, I have been tweaking my strategy over the past few weeks and my typical day now looks like:
- Bed-time between 8:30pm and 9pm
- Awake at 5:30am.
So, my goal of 4am has only been achieved twice. But that’s ok, because every other day over the past 3 weeks I have been up by 6am at the very latest.
This has given me at least one hour every day, and probably about 1 hour and 45minutes on average over the past 3 weeks to really focus deeply on these goals.
Even just 1 hour of deep, focused, work a day, will tally up to 45 rock solid 8 hr days with no breaks, which tallies 2 and a half months of full-time work a year. And again, this is time purely on deep, focused, work. Incredible!
How do you do it?
I found it quite simple.
You simply set a strict rule for yourself in terms of your bedtime and wake up time.
Make sure you push all your bed-time rituals forward to meet your deadline. ie, stop drinking caffeine earlier in the day, stop all your screen time earlier than usual, eat earlier if need be, and so forth.
The main thing is to really internalise the benefits of doing this. The primary benefit being that you will get undistracted, highly focused work done on your most important goals in life. Whether that is working on a big project at work, perhaps it is doing your side hustle, or perhaps it is writing your book, or perhaps it is getting your daily exercise in.
Whatever it is, you need to internalise the benefit of doing this and achieving it.
The other thing is to plan the night before what you will do in the morning.
You do not want to wake up, hit your desk, and then use your willpower and waste time trying to figure out what you are going to do.
Instead, have it planned… know exactly what you are going to do.
Perhaps its that you will write 1,000 words of your book, or that you are going to go for a bicycle ride through the park, or that you are going to research a certain topic.
Having it planned means that within five minutes of waking up, you are focused and doing productive work.
My first 3 weeks have been amazing.
The challenge for me now is to keep this up. I have no intention of stopping this.
I challenge you to experience the magic of the mornings.
This is the time you can really change your life, by working at it every single day.
When you win your mornings, you win the day.
Are you with me?
Brendan
The post Magical Mornings – How to Get More Done Before Breakfast appeared first on The Start of Happiness.
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
“Love is the greatest of all the commandments—all others hang upon it. It is our focus as followers of the living Christ. It is the one trait that, if developed, will most improve our lives.” —Joseph B. Wirthlin
Nephi said the righteous love truth. Alma calls us to remember the song of redeeming love. Mosiah asks us to become as a child, patient and full of love. Mormon warns us of loving money more than the poor. Moroni tells us that the Comforter fills us with perfect love and that love never fails and casts out all fear.
Joseph Smith reminds us that love qualifies us for God’s work, that sanctification comes to those who love and serve God, to be not partial in love, that the priesthood is maintained by love, to show an increase of love after a rebuke and that blessings await those who love the Lord. He warns us not to let love wax cold.
Mark tells us that God is love. Christ said that loving God is the greatest commandment. He instructs us to love our enemies, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to love Him by keeping His commandments and reminds us that God’s love of the world is why He sent His only begotten Son to it in the first place.
In fact, there are over 200 references of love in the Bible—more than 500 depending on the translation you use.
Love Fills our Emptiness
So what’s all the fuss about love? Well, here’s some random thoughts on the most written and sung about topic by poets and songwriters around the world from any generation:
Love fills our empty places. It motivates change and growth. It softens the impact of childhood trauma and helps steady long-held insecurities. It fixes and repairs and overcomes. It even keeps infant’s hearts beating. It sets the stage for our development and determines the difficulty or ease by which we trust and forgive others.
Love conquers, redeems, reforms, uplifts and inspires. When ours is lacking, we stumble more and fall harder. Its lack hurts marriages and damages children and breaks up friendships. Its failure is the author of hate and the womb that gives birth to enemies.
What Love Is and Isn’t
Love deepens the foundations of our psychology, the connections in our sociology and the kindness in our philosophy. Love sees beyond exteriors. It notices the lonely and the friendless. It exercises courage to stick up for the defenseless and reaches out to those who need more than they currently have. Love beautifies and expands. It reaches outward and invites inward.
It is slow to judge and quick to forgive. It is not selfish or proud or unkind. It does not covet or hate or steal or lie or turn a cold shoulder. Love, despite claims insisting otherwise, does not hurt. It’s the real or perceived loss of love that feels so bad. Jealousy is its enemy, not its proof. It doesn’t demand, it gives. Our immaturity, weaknesses, misunderstanding, insecurities and emotional histories can make it difficult to spot even when it is standing right in front of us. In that blindness, we can inadvertently pour cold water on its still-burning embers.
Love Begets Love
So, how do we develop more of it then? First, we recognize that love doesn’t come easily. It’s not a cheap trinket we pick up at the swap meet for pocket change. It requires something of us, even demands it. We can chase it away by trying to pin it down. We can diminish it by stomping on those we want it from. But we must pay the price of love if we want its benefits.
That price includes letting go of fear and grudges, forgiving and repenting, extending ourselves and seeking opportunities to develop more of it. We must push against the outer edge of comfort zones and come to the realization that the best way to get more of it is to give more of it away. Love, in fact, begets more love.
The most certain path to it is by following Christ and doing as He does. We serve and bless and minister to others. And so we work at it, fail at it, repent and work some more on it. We pray for it and pay the price for it. We study it in scripture and Conference talks.
Practice, Practice, Practice
But most of all, we practice love. Over, and over, and over and over and over again. When we get it wrong, we apologize, make amends the best we can, and try again. We learn from our mistakes and chip away at our hardened exteriors, breaking down walls and healing trauma. Authenticity and vulnerability inspire it, so courage is a necessary precondition for it.
When we open our hearts to Christ and give Him the burden of our pain and let Him lift our sins from us, we make room for more love in its purest form. That allows patience with ourselves and for others going through that process, acknowledging that we all improve gradually, by degree, one step at a time, not in a straight line, but by falling back, then stepping forward, only to fall and step forward again.
We fuel our love by looking for the best in others and ourselves. We spend time in uplifting and inspiring endeavors. We go to the temple as often as we can to serve those on the other side of the veil and to feel God’s love for us in that sacred environment as we absorb it’s light and beauty.
We invite others sitting alone to sit with us at church or in class. Or we go sit next to them. We look for opportunities to be kind and thoughtful, considerate and encouraging. The needs and wellbeing of others fills our hearts and prayers.
We recognize unity in diversity, oneness in difference and togetherness in acceptance. We recognize the importance and urgency of gathering all to Christ, no matter the background or current set of circumstances. We see the person beneath the hurt and the softness beyond the rough walls they erect to shield their pain. We celebrate and encourage all those scattered along the covenant path, no matter where they are in relation to where we are or wish they were. We joyfully welcome those returning and keep loving those who never do.
Love is Not a Tool
Love is not a means to an end. It is not a tool to manipulate a desired outcome from its target. It is an end in itself, perhaps the end. It undergirds God’s work and glory. It permeates Christ’s atoning sacrifice. His mission and His glorious redemptive work is infused and encompassed by it. His grace is extended by, through, and because of it.
It is at the heart of the Plan of Salvation and the reason for our creation. It is the great motivating force for all that is “virtuous, lovely, or of good report.”
Where Love Blooms
If you remove love from the world, we are left in a cold, barren, dark and lonely place. But a world (or a ward or family) where love reigns, life comes alive.
It opens and blooms, endowed with purpose and meaning, where weaknesses and mistakes are accepted as part of life and part of the learning and growing process, where differences are embraced, where enough room is given to falter, and encouragement is extended to try again, where intentions are honored even when execution falls short.
Love certainly doesn’t remove life’s challenges or prevent imperfect fails in its expression, but it does make them a whole lot easier to endure. Love is the glow of kindness, the warmth of acceptance and the encouraging nudge toward next steps.
Fine-tuning Love
There is not a single style of love, but there is one necessary expression of it. Remember that Jesus asked Peter three times whether he loved Him. Each time Christ answered Peter’s protestations of love with the injunction to “Go feed my sheep.”
Love, it turns out, is not merely a feeling of the heart. If love stays expressionless, bottled inside, we cripple it and undermine its potential impact on our own and others’ lives. Love was never meant to be hoarded or tucked away in the corner of our lives. Love that’s kept locked in the heart is a neutered, muted, impotent and empty kind of love, a shell of what it could be. Feeding His sheep is at the foundation of its true expression.
For love to reach the impressive heights of its full potential, it must be loosed from the prison of the heart and directed into our feet and hands and mouths. Feelings of love have to translate into words and actions and expressions of love. Love is not so small that it can be reduced to a mere emotion. It is a character trait as well. It’s not simply what we feel. It is fine-tuned in the act of service, nurtured in thoughtful expressions, deepened in warm embraces and sanctified in selfless prayers.
Love His Sheep
So reach out to those around you. Feed His sheep. The visitor. The old timer. The child. The returning member. Everyone!
Accept them. Resist the very human temptation to judge others. See them. Deeply. Charitably. Look beyond the exterior and see them as their Heavenly Father sees them, as His dear beloved children. Nothing more and nothing less.
Then say hello. Get to know them. Love and embrace them in all their glorious imperfection. Invite them. Pray for them. Smile at them. Befriend them. And then watch what happens to our already-loving ward family as love increasingly becomes an even more natural expression of who we are, disciples of Christ in search of His sheep to feed.
Your Turn!
What does love mean to you? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Photo by Pixaby
Magical Mornings – How to Get More Done Before Breakfast
There is something special about waking up early each day.
It is a secret sauce for getting a heck of a lot more done in life.
Almost 3 weeks ago I decided to change my daily schedule by waking up at 4am each day.
4am you say?!
You bet!
Let me tell you how to do it shortly.
But first, let me quickly tell you why I have chosen to do this.
Why wake up so early?
There are literally zero distractions. Your willpower is at its highest. You can focus 100 percent on whatever your biggest goal in life is.
Think about this:
If you were to wake up at 4am each day and get in 3 hours of deep, focused, work before most people wake up at around 7am, that totals 21 hours of work a week, 82 hours of work a month, and over 1,000 hours of work for the year.
1,000 hours of focused, deep work a year is equal to 125x 8hour working days… but these are not your typical 8hr working days with interruptions, meetings, and breaks. These are 8 hours of FOCUSED, DEEP WORK on your most important goals.
Taking it a step further, 125x 8 hr working days is equal to working full-time, in a deep and focused state on your most important goals for 25 weeks of the year! That is just shy of 6 months.
It is crazy how these numbers stack up.
And all it takes it simply waking up earlier and getting focused on what matters most and being consistent with it.
Does it really work?
Most definitely!
In the last three weeks I have:
- Completely updated my Change Your Life program.
- Ran a Flash Sale for you guys.
- Overhauled my website – new theme, new homepage, mostly a lot of backend and design elements that will make things simpler moving forward (check it out if interested and tell me what you think).
- Created a side hustle which I have been hustling on for the last couple of weeks (unfortunately it is not going as well as I had planned… I rapidly launched this to test the idea and so far, it is a slow start).
- Created two other multi-page websites (fully designed and complete) as part of the new side hustle.
- Got more exercise in… being able to go for a walk or a bicycle ride at 5am while the sun is rising is incredibly special… there is something about it that is magical.
- Read 3 books… although this one is because I have changed my night-time routine (to help me start effectively with my morning).
Just writing the above makes me feel in awe of this process. It is simply amazing the output that can be created when this time stacks up each day.
But it is not as simple as it sounds… mostly because I have three young children between the ages of 1 and 5. So, as any parent would understand, trying to stick to a schedule is incredibly hard!
The mornings are the easy part because everyone is sleeping. The hardest part is getting to sleep on time.
I need at LEAST 8 hours of sleep each night to perform at my best. So, to wake up at 4am means getting to bed no later than 8pm. But even then, it is impossible to get a full 8 hours of sleep in because my kids are always waking up each night. I have not had a full-night’s sleep for 5 years now, except for the odd occasion when I am away for business travel. Any parents with young children reading this know exactly what I am talking about!
Here is the reality.
I have only actually woken up at 4am twice during this time (well, one time I got up at 3:57am which was ever better).
To get an 8 hour sleep I really need “bed time” of 8.5 hours, and preferably 9 hours.
Getting to bed at 8pm is tricky. My kids are often still mucking around until 8pm, or sometimes even 8:30pm!
And then there is that time I used to spend with my wife – after the kids are sleep and before our own sleep. This was our quality time together. Going to bed at 8pm took this way.
As a result, I have been tweaking my strategy over the past few weeks and my typical day now looks like:
- Bed-time between 8:30pm and 9pm
- Awake at 5:30am.
So, my goal of 4am has only been achieved twice. But that’s ok, because every other day over the past 3 weeks I have been up by 6am at the very latest.
This has given me at least one hour every day, and probably about 1 hour and 45minutes on average over the past 3 weeks to really focus deeply on these goals.
Even just 1 hour of deep, focused, work a day, will tally up to 45 rock solid 8 hr days with no breaks, which tallies 2 and a half months of full-time work a year. And again, this is time purely on deep, focused, work. Incredible!
How do you do it?
I found it quite simple.
You simply set a strict rule for yourself in terms of your bedtime and wake up time.
Make sure you push all your bed-time rituals forward to meet your deadline. ie, stop drinking caffeine earlier in the day, stop all your screen time earlier than usual, eat earlier if need be, and so forth.
The main thing is to really internalise the benefits of doing this. The primary benefit being that you will get undistracted, highly focused work done on your most important goals in life. Whether that is working on a big project at work, perhaps it is doing your side hustle, or perhaps it is writing your book, or perhaps it is getting your daily exercise in.
Whatever it is, you need to internalise the benefit of doing this and achieving it.
The other thing is to plan the night before what you will do in the morning.
You do not want to wake up, hit your desk, and then use your willpower and waste time trying to figure out what you are going to do.
Instead, have it planned… know exactly what you are going to do.
Perhaps its that you will write 1,000 words of your book, or that you are going to go for a bicycle ride through the park, or that you are going to research a certain topic.
Having it planned means that within five minutes of waking up, you are focused and doing productive work.
My first 3 weeks have been amazing.
The challenge for me now is to keep this up. I have no intention of stopping this.
I challenge you to experience the magic of the mornings.
This is the time you can really change your life, by working at it every single day.
When you win your mornings, you win the day.
Are you with me?
Brendan
The post Magical Mornings – How to Get More Done Before Breakfast appeared first on The Start of Happiness.
Magical Mornings – How to Get More Done Before Breakfast
There is something special about waking up early each day.
It is a secret sauce for getting a heck of a lot more done in life.
Almost 3 weeks ago I decided to change my daily schedule by waking up at 4am each day.
4am you say?!
You bet!
Let me tell you how to do it shortly.
But first, let me quickly tell you why I have chosen to do this.
Why wake up so early?
There are literally zero distractions. Your willpower is at its highest. You can focus 100 percent on whatever your biggest goal in life is.
Think about this:
If you were to wake up at 4am each day and get in 3 hours of deep, focused, work before most people wake up at around 7am, that totals 21 hours of work a week, 82 hours of work a month, and over 1,000 hours of work for the year.
1,000 hours of focused, deep work a year is equal to 125x 8hour working days… but these are not your typical 8hr working days with interruptions, meetings, and breaks. These are 8 hours of FOCUSED, DEEP WORK on your most important goals.
Taking it a step further, 125x 8 hr working days is equal to working full-time, in a deep and focused state on your most important goals for 25 weeks of the year! That is just shy of 6 months.
It is crazy how these numbers stack up.
And all it takes it simply waking up earlier and getting focused on what matters most and being consistent with it.
Does it really work?
Most definitely!
In the last three weeks I have:
- Completely updated my Change Your Life program.
- Ran a Flash Sale for you guys.
- Overhauled my website – new theme, new homepage, mostly a lot of backend and design elements that will make things simpler moving forward (check it out if interested and tell me what you think).
- Created a side hustle which I have been hustling on for the last couple of weeks (unfortunately it is not going as well as I had planned… I rapidly launched this to test the idea and so far, it is a slow start).
- Created two other multi-page websites (fully designed and complete) as part of the new side hustle.
- Got more exercise in… being able to go for a walk or a bicycle ride at 5am while the sun is rising is incredibly special… there is something about it that is magical.
- Read 3 books… although this one is because I have changed my night-time routine (to help me start effectively with my morning).
Just writing the above makes me feel in awe of this process. It is simply amazing the output that can be created when this time stacks up each day.
But it is not as simple as it sounds… mostly because I have three young children between the ages of 1 and 5. So, as any parent would understand, trying to stick to a schedule is incredibly hard!
The mornings are the easy part because everyone is sleeping. The hardest part is getting to sleep on time.
I need at LEAST 8 hours of sleep each night to perform at my best. So, to wake up at 4am means getting to bed no later than 8pm. But even then, it is impossible to get a full 8 hours of sleep in because my kids are always waking up each night. I have not had a full-night’s sleep for 5 years now, except for the odd occasion when I am away for business travel. Any parents with young children reading this know exactly what I am talking about!
Here is the reality.
I have only actually woken up at 4am twice during this time (well, one time I got up at 3:57am which was ever better).
To get an 8 hour sleep I really need “bed time” of 8.5 hours, and preferably 9 hours.
Getting to bed at 8pm is tricky. My kids are often still mucking around until 8pm, or sometimes even 8:30pm!
And then there is that time I used to spend with my wife – after the kids are sleep and before our own sleep. This was our quality time together. Going to bed at 8pm took this way.
As a result, I have been tweaking my strategy over the past few weeks and my typical day now looks like:
- Bed-time between 8:30pm and 9pm
- Awake at 5:30am.
So, my goal of 4am has only been achieved twice. But that’s ok, because every other day over the past 3 weeks I have been up by 6am at the very latest.
This has given me at least one hour every day, and probably about 1 hour and 45minutes on average over the past 3 weeks to really focus deeply on these goals.
Even just 1 hour of deep, focused, work a day, will tally up to 45 rock solid 8 hr days with no breaks, which tallies 2 and a half months of full-time work a year. And again, this is time purely on deep, focused, work. Incredible!
How do you do it?
I found it quite simple.
You simply set a strict rule for yourself in terms of your bedtime and wake up time.
Make sure you push all your bed-time rituals forward to meet your deadline. ie, stop drinking caffeine earlier in the day, stop all your screen time earlier than usual, eat earlier if need be, and so forth.
The main thing is to really internalise the benefits of doing this. The primary benefit being that you will get undistracted, highly focused work done on your most important goals in life. Whether that is working on a big project at work, perhaps it is doing your side hustle, or perhaps it is writing your book, or perhaps it is getting your daily exercise in.
Whatever it is, you need to internalise the benefit of doing this and achieving it.
The other thing is to plan the night before what you will do in the morning.
You do not want to wake up, hit your desk, and then use your willpower and waste time trying to figure out what you are going to do.
Instead, have it planned… know exactly what you are going to do.
Perhaps its that you will write 1,000 words of your book, or that you are going to go for a bicycle ride through the park, or that you are going to research a certain topic.
Having it planned means that within five minutes of waking up, you are focused and doing productive work.
My first 3 weeks have been amazing.
The challenge for me now is to keep this up. I have no intention of stopping this.
I challenge you to experience the magic of the mornings.
This is the time you can really change your life, by working at it every single day.
When you win your mornings, you win the day.
Are you with me?
Brendan
The post Magical Mornings – How to Get More Done Before Breakfast appeared first on The Start of Happiness.