Magical Mornings – How to Get More Done Before Breakfast

self-help

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 is Money Scarcity REALLY Teaching You

self-help

If you are experiencing the struggle over financial lack, it can be challenging to see the lessons money scarcity offers. You are in emotional struggle when you feel worry, frustration and stressed out. Many of us do find it hard to have clarity when we experience emotional overwhelm. Through this article, I hope to shed some insights that have personally helped me create a shift in my relationship with money

For a start, it may seem impossible to will away the perception of scarcity. After all, limits are very much a natural part of our physical life. Just think about it, there is 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in one minute. You have got to finish the work that needs to be done within a certain time frame.

Then, there is also ageing and the cycle of life and death. The physical world has some kind of built-in mechanism where conditions and limits are already preset.

It was also where my confusion came in as well.

For a long time, I had trouble reconciling the ideas of abundance and scarcity. There is the experience of scarcity at physical life because we cannot escape time-space constraints and yet, metaphysical teachers say that the Universe is one of abundance and that we are infinite. So it feels as if both these ideas are on polar ends.

My mind just could not fully grasp or make sense of having scarcity and abundance co-exist together. Hence, no matter how hard I tried to “will” myself to believe that the Universe is abundant, I had the niggling doubt that it could be absolutely true because my experience of the physical world had been otherwise. I was experiencing contrast. 

Is the same conflict bothering you too? Well, when there is non-congruency, it is hard to embody the energy of abundance. Thus, with experiencing scarcity in the physical world, you hit a block each time the mind goes up against a limit. Invariably, you would tell yourself, “there is not enough”. Going up against a limit can set off panic buttons or alarm bells.

To beat money scarcity, you may have even chase after ways to plug the hole. You find yourself working a lot harder and longer, which if you are to reflect, rarely fixes the problem of scarcity or limit that exists in the mind.

Money Scarcity Life Lessons

What Money Scarcity is NOT Teaching You

Money is being printed based on monetary policies by the central bank or government, so technically there is lots of cash in the financial system. Hence a situation of financial lack is only true according to your own physical experience of money.

A situation of money scarcity is not teaching you to dwell in misery. It is certainly not asking you to keep awake at night. Or to blame your spouse, the government or tax authorities either.

Let’s acknowledge that there can be limits in the physical world where certain resources are limited and hence, you experience scarcity. On the other hand, it helps to remember that scarcity and limits can also be a construct of the ego. When you identify too much with limiting thoughts, you can hold yourself back from achieving what you do want. 

spiritual being in human experience

If you can recall, your soul did choose to experience scarcity in an incarnation, so that it can embody the truth of its divine nature. Contrast allows for experiential knowing. Your soul can only know abundance through having a contrasting situation in a physical life. It’s like you will not know what cold is without the contrasting experience of heat. Or it’s hard to figure out what love is without going through fear in an experience.

An experience of financial lack is something that you can choose to reverse. As much as we can undertake measures or strategies to “make more money”, it also involves an inside-out approach where you first reawaken to the truth. By reminding yourself the truth of your being and reconnecting with  sense of worthiness , you can then make the inner shift that often translates to manifesting the truth on the outside: that abundance (including money) is actually available to you!

What Money Scarcity is Teaching You Instead

Remember this: limits are not dead ends.

What scarcity is truly teaching you is about appreciating what is important:

* Are you appreciating life?

* Are you making the best use of a limited life span?

* Are you making the best use of limited resources?

* Are you embracing what appears to be finite: time, money and the life energy of your family and friends?

In short, scarcity is teaching you to redirect your focus.

When you start to put your attention on the things that matter, illusion dissolves. There is no need to grasp, cling or hanker for something out there because there is already the richness of life! Indeed, this is where you practice gratitude! 

Material things do not last. Money doesn’t. You become awakened to the truth that you are a divine soul. In that moment of deep realisation, your soul recognises abundance as a quintessential quality of its eternal being. It is when you embody the inner experience of the awakening that true abundance manifests in the physical world.

Would like to make a Relation-SHIFT in the way you think and feel about money and yourself? Check out my course on Transforming Your Relationship with Money here…

Transform Relationship with Money Course Banner
Transform Your Relationship with Money Course

Share your thoughts with what scarcity or money scarcity is really teaching you in the comments below 🙂

Love and abundance always,
Evelyn Lim 
Abundance Coach
Life Coach for Women

P.S. Have got money blocks that you’d like to address? 

The post What is Money Scarcity REALLY Teaching You appeared first on Abundance Coach for Women in Business | Evelyn Lim.

Magical Mornings – How to Get More Done Before Breakfast

self-help

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.

12 Tips to Effectively Communicate With Your Doctor

self-help

12 Tips to Effectively Communicate With Your Doctor

The post 12 Tips to Effectively Communicate With Your Doctor appeared first on NotSalmon.

If there’s one thing you should handle with the utmost care, it’s how to effectively communicate with your doctor. – so you can successfully protect your health. After all, doctors will be giving you medication accompanied by important instructions and […]

The post 12 Tips to Effectively Communicate With Your Doctor appeared first on NotSalmon.

What is Money Scarcity REALLY Teaching You

self-help

If you are experiencing the struggle over financial lack, it can be challenging to see the lessons money scarcity offers. You are in emotional struggle when you feel worry, frustration and stressed out. Many of us do find it hard to have clarity when we experience emotional overwhelm. Through this article, I hope to shed some insights that have personally helped me create a shift in my relationship with money

For a start, it may seem impossible to will away the perception of scarcity. After all, limits are very much a natural part of our physical life. Just think about it, there is 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in one minute. You have got to finish the work that needs to be done within a certain time frame.

Then, there is also ageing and the cycle of life and death. The physical world has some kind of built-in mechanism where conditions and limits are already preset.

It was also where my confusion came in as well.

For a long time, I had trouble reconciling the ideas of abundance and scarcity. There is the experience of scarcity at physical life because we cannot escape time-space constraints and yet, metaphysical teachers say that the Universe is one of abundance and that we are infinite. So it feels as if both these ideas are on polar ends.

My mind just could not fully grasp or make sense of having scarcity and abundance co-exist together. Hence, no matter how hard I tried to “will” myself to believe that the Universe is abundant, I had the niggling doubt that it could be absolutely true because my experience of the physical world had been otherwise. I was experiencing contrast. 

Is the same conflict bothering you too? Well, when there is non-congruency, it is hard to embody the energy of abundance. Thus, with experiencing scarcity in the physical world, you hit a block each time the mind goes up against a limit. Invariably, you would tell yourself, “there is not enough”. Going up against a limit can set off panic buttons or alarm bells.

To beat money scarcity, you may have even chase after ways to plug the hole. You find yourself working a lot harder and longer, which if you are to reflect, rarely fixes the problem of scarcity or limit that exists in the mind.

Money Scarcity Life Lessons

What Money Scarcity is NOT Teaching You

Money is being printed based on monetary policies by the central bank or government, so technically there is lots of cash in the financial system. Hence a situation of financial lack is only true according to your own physical experience of money.

A situation of money scarcity is not teaching you to dwell in misery. It is certainly not asking you to keep awake at night. Or to blame your spouse, the government or tax authorities either.

Let’s acknowledge that there can be limits in the physical world where certain resources are limited and hence, you experience scarcity. On the other hand, it helps to remember that scarcity and limits can also be a construct of the ego. When you identify too much with limiting thoughts, you can hold yourself back from achieving what you do want. 

spiritual being in human experience

If you can recall, your soul did choose to experience scarcity in an incarnation, so that it can embody the truth of its divine nature. Contrast allows for experiential knowing. Your soul can only know abundance through having a contrasting situation in a physical life. It’s like you will not know what cold is without the contrasting experience of heat. Or it’s hard to figure out what love is without going through fear in an experience.

An experience of financial lack is something that you can choose to reverse. As much as we can undertake measures or strategies to “make more money”, it also involves an inside-out approach where you first reawaken to the truth. By reminding yourself the truth of your being and reconnecting with  sense of worthiness , you can then make the inner shift that often translates to manifesting the truth on the outside: that abundance (including money) is actually available to you!

What Money Scarcity is Teaching You Instead

Remember this: limits are not dead ends.

What scarcity is truly teaching you is about appreciating what is important:

* Are you appreciating life?

* Are you making the best use of a limited life span?

* Are you making the best use of limited resources?

* Are you embracing what appears to be finite: time, money and the life energy of your family and friends?

In short, scarcity is teaching you to redirect your focus.

When you start to put your attention on the things that matter, illusion dissolves. There is no need to grasp, cling or hanker for something out there because there is already the richness of life! Indeed, this is where you practice gratitude! 

Material things do not last. Money doesn’t. You become awakened to the truth that you are a divine soul. In that moment of deep realisation, your soul recognises abundance as a quintessential quality of its eternal being. It is when you embody the inner experience of the awakening that true abundance manifests in the physical world.

Would like to make a Relation-SHIFT in the way you think and feel about money and yourself? Check out my course on Transforming Your Relationship with Money here…

Transform Relationship with Money Course Banner
Transform Your Relationship with Money Course

Share your thoughts with what scarcity or money scarcity is really teaching you in the comments below 🙂

Love and abundance always,
Evelyn Lim 
Abundance Coach
Life Coach for Women

P.S. Have got money blocks that you’d like to address? 

The post What is Money Scarcity REALLY Teaching You appeared first on Abundance Coach for Women in Business | Evelyn Lim.

What is Money Scarcity REALLY Teaching You

self-help

If you are experiencing the struggle over financial lack, it can be challenging to see the lessons money scarcity offers. You are in emotional struggle when you feel worry, frustration and stressed out. Many of us do find it hard to have clarity when we experience emotional overwhelm. Through this article, I hope to shed some insights that have personally helped me create a shift in my relationship with money

For a start, it may seem impossible to will away the perception of scarcity. After all, limits are very much a natural part of our physical life. Just think about it, there is 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in one minute. You have got to finish the work that needs to be done within a certain time frame.

Then, there is also ageing and the cycle of life and death. The physical world has some kind of built-in mechanism where conditions and limits are already preset.

It was also where my confusion came in as well.

For a long time, I had trouble reconciling the ideas of abundance and scarcity. There is the experience of scarcity at physical life because we cannot escape time-space constraints and yet, metaphysical teachers say that the Universe is one of abundance and that we are infinite. So it feels as if both these ideas are on polar ends.

My mind just could not fully grasp or make sense of having scarcity and abundance co-exist together. Hence, no matter how hard I tried to “will” myself to believe that the Universe is abundant, I had the niggling doubt that it could be absolutely true because my experience of the physical world had been otherwise. I was experiencing contrast. 

Is the same conflict bothering you too? Well, when there is non-congruency, it is hard to embody the energy of abundance. Thus, with experiencing scarcity in the physical world, you hit a block each time the mind goes up against a limit. Invariably, you would tell yourself, “there is not enough”. Going up against a limit can set off panic buttons or alarm bells.

To beat money scarcity, you may have even chase after ways to plug the hole. You find yourself working a lot harder and longer, which if you are to reflect, rarely fixes the problem of scarcity or limit that exists in the mind.

Money Scarcity Life Lessons

What Money Scarcity is NOT Teaching You

Money is being printed based on monetary policies by the central bank or government, so technically there is lots of cash in the financial system. Hence a situation of financial lack is only true according to your own physical experience of money.

A situation of money scarcity is not teaching you to dwell in misery. It is certainly not asking you to keep awake at night. Or to blame your spouse, the government or tax authorities either.

Let’s acknowledge that there can be limits in the physical world where certain resources are limited and hence, you experience scarcity. On the other hand, it helps to remember that scarcity and limits can also be a construct of the ego. When you identify too much with limiting thoughts, you can hold yourself back from achieving what you do want. 

spiritual being in human experience

If you can recall, your soul did choose to experience scarcity in an incarnation, so that it can embody the truth of its divine nature. Contrast allows for experiential knowing. Your soul can only know abundance through having a contrasting situation in a physical life. It’s like you will not know what cold is without the contrasting experience of heat. Or it’s hard to figure out what love is without going through fear in an experience.

An experience of financial lack is something that you can choose to reverse. As much as we can undertake measures or strategies to “make more money”, it also involves an inside-out approach where you first reawaken to the truth. By reminding yourself the truth of your being and reconnecting with  sense of worthiness , you can then make the inner shift that often translates to manifesting the truth on the outside: that abundance (including money) is actually available to you!

What Money Scarcity is Teaching You Instead

Remember this: limits are not dead ends.

What scarcity is truly teaching you is about appreciating what is important:

* Are you appreciating life?

* Are you making the best use of a limited life span?

* Are you making the best use of limited resources?

* Are you embracing what appears to be finite: time, money and the life energy of your family and friends?

In short, scarcity is teaching you to redirect your focus.

When you start to put your attention on the things that matter, illusion dissolves. There is no need to grasp, cling or hanker for something out there because there is already the richness of life! Indeed, this is where you practice gratitude! 

Material things do not last. Money doesn’t. You become awakened to the truth that you are a divine soul. In that moment of deep realisation, your soul recognises abundance as a quintessential quality of its eternal being. It is when you embody the inner experience of the awakening that true abundance manifests in the physical world.

Would like to make a Relation-SHIFT in the way you think and feel about money and yourself? Check out my course on Transforming Your Relationship with Money here…

Transform Relationship with Money Course Banner
Transform Your Relationship with Money Course

Share your thoughts with what scarcity or money scarcity is really teaching you in the comments below 🙂

Love and abundance always,
Evelyn Lim 
Abundance Coach
Life Coach for Women

P.S. Have got money blocks that you’d like to address? 

The post What is Money Scarcity REALLY Teaching You appeared first on Abundance Coach for Women in Business | Evelyn Lim.

Magical Mornings – How to Get More Done Before Breakfast

self-help

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.

7 Tactics For Dealing With Annoying Coworkers Who Talk Too Much

self-help

According to a CareerBuilder survey, of the top 10 productivity killers in the workplace, 7 of them involve too much socializing. If you have coworkers who talk too much, this probably doesn’t surprise you. You’re here, now, because you want to know how to deal with people who talk too much — or how to …

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The post 7 Tactics For Dealing With Annoying Coworkers Who Talk Too Much appeared first on Live Bold and Bloom.

What Is the COMPTIA NETWORK+ Exam About? Can a Practice Test Help You Anticipate Your Results?

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Introduction For law students, there are inherent aspects of their profession that they have to fulfill. Many of them decide to do this by going to a law school after college. And in some countries like the USA and Canada, they have to be assessed through the Law School Assessment Test (COMPTIA NETWORK+) before enrolling….

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The post What Is the COMPTIA NETWORK+ Exam About? Can a Practice Test Help You Anticipate Your Results? first appeared on Self Help Daily.

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What are YOUR Strongest Thoughts?? Stress and anxiety are realities of life and, quite frankly they always have been! I think we tend to think of them as new discoveries when, if we’re being honest, they’ve been around as long as humans have. One of the worst things about feeling stressed and anxious is the…

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The post 3 Simple Ways to Gain Get a Healthier Perspective on Life first appeared on Self Help Daily.