Hello and welcome to my latest blog post, ‘Master Your Mornings’. I want to talk to you today about the changes and the positive benefits that are going to come to you with ease and flow when you master your mornings. When you master mornings well, your whole life changes for the better and all the goals that you’ve been manifesting and wanting to achieve start to come true. It’s absolutely mind blowing.
You will master your mornings and you’ll watch your life elevate to a level you never thought possible, just by getting up a little bit earlier.
But you know what? It’s very, very difficult to initially get up early in the morning.
Because life is tough enough without trying to get up earlier. We’ve already got a lot going on. And when we have so much going on, the last thing that we want to be doing is getting up early in the morning because when you’re getting up early in the morning, then you have to be thinking about getting to bed a little bit earlier. And I know from my own experience, and from speaking to so many of you, that the evening times is one of the only times that you have for yourself. So the last thing you want to be doing is heading to bed so early if you’ve only been sitting on the couch, relaxing for a half an hour of your day.
So I get all that. It absolutely makes sense. We’re all so busy now, whether with elderly parents, parents you’re looking after, or children or family, or your job, your career, whatever it is that’s going on. I know a lot of you are so busy. And with that busyness comes tiredness. And with that tiredness comes you not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. And why on earth would you set your alarm clock if you’re not going to be sleeping that great and if you’re absolutely knackered?
The only benefits that you’re going to have from staying in bed until you have to is the coziness of the covers and not having to face the dark. And I get it. You’re in bed in the morning time, the weather’s bad, it’s pitch black outside. You’re really, really cozy. You may have had a bad night’s sleep, if you’re a peri-menopausal or menopausal, or just stressed out. And God knows, in this pandemic, we all are. So the last thing you want to be doing is getting up.
But something has to give in your life if you want to achieve your goals and give yourself head space to achieve those goals, and also to keep the goals in the forefront of your mind. And it’s all well and good having these great plans to journal throughout the day, or when you finish your work, to journal in the evening times.
But I think the faster we get to the point where we’re just calling a spade a spade and saying the last thing we want to be doing in the evening times is doing more work. Even though it’s working on ourselves, it’s not a great time. And if you’re one of the few people that do really enjoy working on yourself in the evening, then I’m obviously not talking to you. But for the vast majority of you, the 90% of you out there that get to the evening time, you’re absolutely knackered, and after dinner, all you want to do is watch some chewing gum stuff on the TV to just wind down, then I am talking to you. I’m talking to you.
So let’s first off be honest with ourselves and talk about what’s not going to work. Committing to manifesting, meditating, journaling, and all that sort of stuff, after the morning time. It’s just not going to happen. Your evenings are for yourself. So once you know that, and you know that it’s not going to work any other way other than the morning times, then that’s one step of progress. That is one more step towards you getting what you want out of this life. So you know what’s not going to work. That’s the first really important step.
The second step after that then, is to figuring out why on earth would you bother getting up earlier in the morning than you have to? And I’m going to reel off a couple of benefits. You’ve time to work on yourself, your goals, your dreams, and your wishes that you have for yourself. It’s peace and quiet time all for you. It’s a time when you get to work on yourself. You get to be consistent at working for yourself. So if you’re already getting up at seven o’clock in the morning, I’m going to recommend you eventually go for 6:00 or 6:30. But for the minute, we’re just going to talk about getting up at 20 to 7:00. So let’s just say 7:00 is the time you normally get up at. But obviously, if it’s 9:00 or 8:00 or 7:30, you just work back from that. But you’re going to start off getting up 15 minutes earlier than you have to.
And first of all, you’re going to recognise that the weather’s going to be bad, it’s going to be dark, and that the covers are going to be so cozy. I think you really need to acknowledge that because I think sometimes when you’re trying to create a habit, it comes as a shock. Like oh God, it’s really dark outside and the covers are cozy. Yeah, no, I know. But you’re going to go and do it anyway. You need to really take emotion out of it and set your alarm clock and have no bullshit about yourself and go and plug your phone in, put it on airplane mode, set your alarm clock for 20 minutes earlier than you have to. And you’re just going to fecking get up. You’re just going to bucking get up out of bed, in spite of the covers being cozy.
And the really terrific thing that’s going to come from you having a really good morning routine is that you’re going to achieve goals because your head’s always going to be in the game. If you set goals with me on the 1st of January, and you don’t look at those goals but you continue along with your action steps, you’re going to peter off. Because you’re going to forget your why, you’re going to forget all the reasons why you’re doing it and you’re not going to remember all your goals and your action steps compared to somebody that sets goals, for example, with me at the start of the month. And then writes about them every weekday while they’re doing them, reviewing what’s going well, what’s not going so well, what you need to focus on. Doing that every week, every day, during the week, day in, day out, you are going to smash the month.
So you’re going to be able to think and be without the daily grind, keeping you away from thinking and goal setting and keeping focused on your plan. That’s what’s keeping you away from your goals. It’s not you or your intelligence or your personality. It’s the daily grind. It’s the fact that we’re walking around this life, reacting to things because things come up and we never dedicate enough time to act and to remove ourself from the daily grind. The daily grind is autopilot.
Your best thinking and your best dreams and goal setting and wishes aren’t going to come out of an autopilot daily grind. You need to step out of that. And what I was saying to you at the start of this post is that if you’re committed to stepping out of the daily grind and working on yourself, then you need to be real with yourself that that’s just not going to happen in the evening time. So that leaves the morning time. Established.
What do you need to do to live your best life in the morning time?
I did this with my clients, an Eight Minute Master Your Morning routine. I’m going to do a 15 Minute Master Your Morning tomorrow, but you’re going to start off with 8 minutes. What you want to be doing is:
silence;
goal setting;
manifesting;
affirmations;
and journaling.
And that’s it. That’s all you need to do in the more morning time.
And you can dedicate 10 minutes to it starting off, or 15 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes, or you could even do an hour and include your 30 minute workouts. Wow if you got your workout in, in the morning time as well, which I personally think is terrific. Because remember this is all going to have a nice knock on effect.
You’re going to get up earlier in the morning, you’re going to get all your stuff done, the evening times are free for you to relax, you’re going to naturally want to go to bed earlier and you’re going to get good sleep because you’re going to be absolutely exhausted in a nice way.
So you want to start off your 20 minutes or your 15 minutes. Now you can just shorten or lengthen this out. But the way it works is you’re going to get up in the morning, grab yourself a cup of coffee, sit down at the kitchen table. You’re going to do some breathing, just sitting in silence and taking nice deep breaths for two to three minutes. Then you’re going to do some goal setting in your head. You’re going to go through three goals. Goal number one, goal number two, goal number three. What is it? You’re going to visualise yourself having achieved it and you’re going to imagine yourself in that moment and what it’s like.
And then you’re going to move on to manifesting, which is the bridge between the goals you want achieved and you having achieved it. So manifesting is just coming up with the how, and you’re going to go through each goal. This is all just in your head. You’re going to keep your eyes closed and go through each goal that you set in the goal setting part. And you’re going to list your yourself out three or four action steps to how you’re going to achieve those goals.
And then, because you’ve just done that you’re going to journal and you’re going to open up your book and you’re going to journal for three to four minutes about your goals, and your action steps and how you’re going to get there and what you want as part of your daily routine to strive to be healthy, and what you need to improve on and what you’re outstanding at. And that’s three minutes of journaling and then you need to move on to the affirmations.
We all have negative self talk. So affirmations is just, it’s science. You can’t disagree with it. It’s you telling yourself a new story. I have all I need within me now to be successful. Day by day in every way, I’m getting better and better. All those affirmations really work. And it’s very, very important that you work on your mindset or you’re never going to achieve what you want to be because what you want to achieve, because you will hold yourself back.
You’ll find when you do journaling and affirmations, roadblock that you’ve put yourself under. Like, what I never used to understand was when you are focused on what you don’t want, that is in a way manifesting, and you then get what you don’t want because you’re constantly thinking about it. So there’s all these kind of stuff that you only really realize when you take action. And taking action is pretty mind blowing because you might start off this exercise with me in the beginning of January with all these goals. And by the time March comes around, your goals are completely different, because you’ve decided you don’t want it because you’ve taken action.
So it’s really, really interesting and it really, really leads you down to you living your best life. And what I mean by living your best life, just being for happy most of the time and feeling really good, not living for the weekends or your holidays or buying stuff to make you happy. But genuinely, truly finding a joy in every day and trying to limit the names of the days as much as possible and finding every day joyful, which can really happen if you work at it hard. Because nobody tells you that you have to work hard at feeling good. And when you work hard at feeling good, the rewards are absolutely huge. Really, really, absolutely huge.
So what I recommend you do is you get off this podcast and write down what you’re going to start off with. So are you going to start getting up 10 minutes earlier than you have to, or 15 or 20 or a half an hour? And then you’re just going to write down the format of your morning. So if it’s 15 minutes, it’s going to be broken down into 2 minutes of silence, 3 minutes of goal setting, 3 minutes of manifesting, 5 minutes of journal and 2 minutes of affirmations. And make sure you have your affirmations to hand and you know what you are saying. My favorite affirmations to say out loud is, “Every day in every way, I’m getting better and better. This year, I live my purpose by being authentically me. Everything I need is within me.” If you were to say one of those like six times, taking nice deep breath and really meaning it and really believing it, then you’re going to start living out your truth.
And once you start then mastering your mornings, you’ve got your goal setting and you’re manifesting and you’re doing affirmations and you’re sitting in silence, you’re going to master your life. So you can expand that if you want to. You can start off with 10 minutes, 5 days a week and then move to 15 or to 20. Or what I do is my Tuesday mornings and Thursday mornings, I do like a longer Master Your Morning session. But then the other days of the week, I do like a slightly shorter one, like 10 to 15 minutes.
Remember that consistency is key, that it’s not about perfection. I was putting off doing this podcast episode because I didn’t feel like I could explain myself right with this. As silly as that sounds now, it’s amazing what we can put ourselves off because we’re waiting for the perfect time. But there really is no perfect time. I wish to God, somebody could tattoo that on me somewhere because I need to remember that too. I’ve just really learned so much about putting yourself out there, spreading your message. It doesn’t matter. Just get it out there. It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Stop being so afraid of what bucking people think. It’s not important.
So I hope you got something out of this blog post. Like with every blog post that I put out there, I say to you that I always want you to get one thing out of it. And if you could get one thing out of this episode, it would be to get up 10 minutes earlier than normal, Monday to Friday, and start mastering your mornings and manifest your goals and watch your life flourish. All my love to you and have a great day.
Jessica Cooke X
P.S You can go to my free tools section and download lots of free stuff to help you on your journey
