GOALS AND MORNING ROUTINES PART TWO
A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO ADDING YOUR GOALS INTO YOUR MORNING ROUTINE
Good Mornings’ mission is ‘To give everyone the best foundation for growth, introduce daily changes, and reach all their goals’. We believe your morning routine is the key to achieving everything you want in life, so our goals and our morning routines are completely linked and built to complement and enable change. This week we’re setting out a four step framework to add your goals into your morning routine.
STEP ONE - REVIEW YOUR GOALS
Step one is to look at all you’re working towards (hopefully not too many, we can’t stress enough that it’s detrimental to work on too many goals at once, it should be 2 or 3 maximum four) and put yourself in the future state that you have achieved ALL of them. In this future state what practices have you adopted (i.e. fitness goals, how many times a week are you working out, finance goals, are you saving and changing habits or are you adding) and what practices would enable you to get there faster. For a lot of people, this is things like reading, learning, exercising, practice time. The best way to integrate a new habit, or build mastery in something which will help you reach your goal is to introduce it slowly into your morning routine. When you look at your goals and where you want to be, think of the type of morning that person would have, imagine what would be beneficial to it and integrate slowly, and one at a time.
STEP TWO - DIVE INTO YOUR MINI GOALS
If you have been following our goal setting process you will have done your steps for each goal. Now you have looked over your end state for your goal, it’s time to look through the steps you are going to take to get there. Your steps or mini goals will have key milestones in which to apply the same audit. Take a look at your steps and see any similarities or behaviours that are common. From these common themes you should be able to pull out daily processes. What we mean by daily processes is daily acts to get to your steps, a little like tinier steps towards those mini goals, and forming part of your to-do list for each goal. A daily process may be to check the markets to see if you need adjustments to your portfolio. To post a tweet that will help get into the habit of engaging on social every day to launch your business. What ever that means for you, you should now have practices and processes, ready to slowly introduce to your morning routine.
STEP THREE - MAKE SPACE TO ADD
Step three is to make room in your morning routine to add in your new practices and daily processes (eventially, its all about the small steps remember). If you have been following our framework for setting up your morning routine you should have an extra 30 minutes within which you can add in your new practice or habit. You don’t need to make your new practice or habit last that full 30 minutes, keep the window free for adjustments and flexibility in your morning routine, but you should have space to add in one new habit without changing your wake up time or out the door time.
The key to this is to go slow, you may have pulled a list of things you need to be doing in order to reach your goal. But if you suddenly wake up tomorrow and try and check the markets, post a social, read an article, do some excerssie, make your lunch at home instead of buying, then you’re going to have an extremely busy morning and get completely overwhelmed and burnt out. As with adding anything into your morning routine, tiny steps and the smallest viable start.
STEP FOUR - PLAN OUT TIME TO REFLECT
Once you have your list of later introductions and your new process or practice in your morning routine, the last thing you need to do is set yourself up to keep going and continue refining. The best morning routine is the one you stick to, and now you have a plan you need to commit and keep going. The biggest tip we can give when setting up your goals with your morning routine is to set aside reflection time. We do this every week on a Sunday. In this we look at what went well during the week and what didn’t, noting obstacles but also days where we were on top of the world – what happened and how do we replicate this. On this day we see how much we’re picking up our new habits, whether they’re working for us and look at whether it’s time to introduce the next (small) step.
This time to reflect is important because it enables you to make small changes which will result in marginal gains.
