Much of our days unfold out of habit. Sources say anywhere from 45 to 90% of our day is habitual. What we do and the activities that make up our days happen automatically without much thought.
Is Your Current Morning Routine Serving You & Your Direct Sales Business?
You currently have a morning routine. You do. Whether it’s intentional, serving you now, and enhancing your role as a Direct Sales Leader is what today’s episode is all about.
Your morning unfolds every day. I encourage you to jot down the series of events that happen each morning. In detail. From when you take your first drink of water, coffee, or tea, to your first bathroom visit, to when you get dressed, and everything in between.
It can be a lot. Mornings are busy and can be a hectic time of the day. But mornings don’t have to be. In fact, I’m here to help you take back your mornings so you can be even more intentional about how you start your day. And how the rest of it unfolds. This is so powerful!
You can intentionally choose how your morning unfolds step by step. What you choose can serve you in this current season of life. It can also enhance all of your roles from Direct Sales leader, to spouse, partner, and mom.
Elevate Your Mornings as a Direct Sales Leader
Most importantly, your morning intentions can also elevate you physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
This time of day, how you begin your day, has exponential potential to set you up for your best day yet, day after day! How powerful and exciting is that?!
Let’s take back your mornings and reinvent them so you can experience every day as your best day yet!
Now, if you’re thinking “my morning routine is dialed in, I’ve got it set and it’s really working for me.” I say great! It sounds like you’re intentional and have really planned things out. Wonderful! And yet I invite you to take a fresh look at it. If there is an opportunity for you to elevate your morning intentions, why wouldn’t you?
Your First Step in Taking Back Your Mornings as a High Achiever in Direct Sales
First things first. Write down what’s currently happening. Here is where you find two things. One, opportunity. And two, the must-do’s. There are activities that happen in your morning out of habit that doesn’t have to be there. They’re there because, again, we do so much out of routine without pausing to truly think it through. This is your chance to stop and re-evaluate.
Identify the opportunities where you can make a change. Identify the absolute must-do’s in the morning. The activities that can’t happen any other time of day. I promise you will find things that can be shifted.
Driving kids to school. Can’t move that. Or can you? Maybe your spouse or partner can take one or more mornings and this may change week by week. Maybe you can rideshare with a neighbor. I had a client that actually hired a driving service for her kids or she would have spent 6 hours in the car every day between drop off and pick up.
What about making lunches. Do as much of it the night before as you can. Once you’ve written down how your mornings currently unfold, I promise there will be areas that can be tweaked.
After you’ve written down the list of things that happen in the morning set it aside. You’ll come back to it.
Your Second Step in Re-Setting Your Mornings as a Direct Sales Leader
Second, you’ll want to check in with your priorities and values. Yikes! I know, right. Listen, early morning hours are the golden hours. There is no other opportunity throughout your day than to start it out in a way that serves you. You’ve got one chance to start your day intentionally.
How much of your morning routine speaks to your priorities and values? Is it time for a refresh? To shake things up in an intentional way that better serves you?
Three Needs You Have to Meet with Morning Intentions as a Direct Sales Leader
Ok, as a Direct Sales leader, and on top of your game in all the other hats you wear, you need to be focused, productive, and you need the energy to sustain you throughout the day and into the evening. I know!
To be the best leader for your Direct Sales team you need to be your personal best, for this current season of life. More on this in just a second. I have a client that says “when I grow always and in all ways, my business grows too.” I love this. It couldn’t be more true and exactly what she’s experienced.
Four Strategies to Set Your Morning Intentions as a Direct Sales Leader
Four important points about your morning intentions before we set out:
- Design your morning intentions for your current season of life.
- Change your morning intentions only when you have BIG changes in life. Much of the time, your morning intentions will help you navigate big changes, by simply sticking to them. Other times, you’ll need to modify your morning intentions to better serve you and the season you or your family are in.
- Keep your morning intentions when you’re out of your normal setting; this simply requires creativity.
- Once your morning intentions are set, guard them.
Stay tuned and I’ll give you a personal example of my morning intentions with examples of how I apply these four points.
Your Third and Final Step in Setting Morning Intentions as a Direct Sales Leader
Third, I’m going to give you the most important intention for your morning routine. Regardless of your priorities and values, this one is the most important way to start your morning intentions, if you want focus, productivity, and sustained energy for a morning that gives you the best start to your day!
The One Most Impactful Way You Can Start Every Morning as a Direct Sales Leader
The single most impactful start to your day is to sweat. First thing. Don’t turn me off! Haha. Hear me out. Stick with me on this. I’m intentionally picking fitness first. For specific reasons.
Not only personal experience, which I will share, but my lengthy career before my Crazy Big Dreams business was Exercise Science. One of my degrees is Exercise Science with an industry gold standard certification as an exercise physiologist. This was me in my previous career. It’s so fun to reinvent yourself! Hear me out!
Putting exercise first, assuming you break a sweat, helps increase your attention, you are more serene, your responses to everyday stressors like pressures, rude people, someone cutting you off in traffic, things that unexplainably are just not going your way, a screaming child…all of your responses are more graceful vs reactive.
Of course, it fuels fat burning, increases your metabolism, serotonin, & dopamine, while leveling out the stress hormone, cortisol. This all carries into more energy, productivity, and focus.
It is the single best way to start your day. You simply have to sweat for 15 to 20 minutes to enjoy all of these benefits! You can do anything to break a sweat. You don’t have to work out for an hour, go to a gym, or even leave your house. You simply can do anything that elevates your heart rate to break a sweat, for 15 to 20 minutes. Yes, that’s it!
Does walking fast make you sweat. Great! Go walk. Do you need to be home because the kids are asleep? Great, get up, find the furthest spot from where they are sleeping, walk in place, jog in place, do jumping jacks, jump rope, you get the idea. Move. Sweat. You’re done.
Now, if it’s part of your current routine to go to a gym or to do an exercise class at a specific time, later in the day, and not when you first get up, great! Keep doing it. Are you doing this class every day? Probably not.
Sweat for 15 to 20 minutes on the other days. As soon as you wake up! Commit for a month. Notice. Simply notice how different you feel on the days you choose to sweat first thing.
Ultimately, the best reward to set you up for your best day yet, every day, is to sweat first, 15 to 20 minutes. Regardless of any other activity you may have planned throughout the rest of your day. Eventually, or who knows, maybe right now, do this first, in addition to other activities.
When I suggest first thing, I mean the very first thing. Like, sleep in your workout clothes if you need to. Before coffee, before anything else, you are sweating. You won’t feel the same after 20 minutes as when you wake up.
Now, I know what’s likely coming up for you. All the reasons you can’t. I’ll have to wash my hair. I don’t have time to shower. I’ll wake up the kids. And although these may sound valid to you now, there is a way around each.
Get creative. Where there’s a will there’s a way. You’ve done hard things. This is not hard. This is simply rearranging your morning habits to serve you in the best way. What can you drop, shift, re-prioritize, delegate, or do later?
Maybe you don’t have time for a full shower, but maybe you can get cleaned up enough until you do get that shower. Have you found a good dry shampoo? Game changer! Stick a hat on your head. Step outside so you don’t wake the kids.
There is a way! How will you find your way to more energy, productivity, and focus? I know you can.
Let me share a quick personal example to pull this together for you while applying the 4 important points I mentioned earlier.
- Design your morning intentions for your current season of life.
When the pandemic hit, my little one was 2 and in a preschool class every morning. As you remember, the world stopped, that Friday for us. I picked him up from school and he didn’t go back.
I had a full schedule for my business and all things running the household. My husband doesn’t have a job where he can be flexible with the hours or his responsibilities. I had to clear my calendar over the weekend and re-group. I know so many of you can relate.
We suddenly had nowhere to be. I was overwhelmed, stressed about my business, scared about what was happening, and tired. I decided to just sleep in with my little one. He would poke me in the eye and say “Wake up time mama.” That worked for about 2 days. It worked for no one.
I knew I had to get myself up and organized if I was going to have any fighting chance of making it through the days. I started setting my alarm at 5 am, then 4:45, then 4:30. I started my day with exercise. Most of the time a quick 15 to 20-minute run. Other days on our elliptical, or activities at home that got my heart rate up.
2. Change your morning intentions only when you have BIG changes in life. Much of the time, your morning intentions will help you navigate big changes, by simply sticking to them. Other times, you’ll need to modify your morning intentions to better serve you and the season you or your family are in.
Fast forward a few years. I have morning sickness 24-7. My husband is off to work before we woke up and wasn’t getting home until after the toddler went to bed. Days were loooonnnnggg. I needed rest. I needed to have a healthy pregnancy.
I wasn’t sleeping well. And I needed more sleep. I stopped getting up at 5 am. I still had the same morning intentions, but I did them after my little one went to preschool. This was a temporary change, but a necessary one for that BIG change in life.
3. Keep your morning intentions when you’re out of your normal setting; this simply requires creativity.
When you travel, visit family, have a weekend away, keep your morning intentions. Our first thought is to stop them. In fact, it’s rarely a choice. We just assume because we’re not in our normal surroundings, we have to let go of our normal morning intentions. You don’t.
Maybe you have to be a little more creative to stick to them, but you don’t have to abandon them altogether.
If you choose to, let it be a conscious, intentional choice. Determine what you need to step right back into your morning intentions when you return. I’ll set out my workout clothes and shoes before I leave for vacation so when I return, there they are, welcoming me back, ready to go, reminding me that this serves me so well.
4. Once your morning intentions are set, guard them.
It’s ok to be ruthless about your morning intentions. Talk to your spouse, partner, or depending on if you have kids and their ages, talk to them as well. Let them know this is important to you.
I personally do my morning rituals before both my husband and son are up. I know it won’t happen otherwise. There is something magical about that time of day. Especially on weekends. It feels like the whole world is asleep.
I have my best thinking. It’s a sacred time for me. I love the tone it sets for my day. I have the focus, energy, and productivity. I get so much more accomplished. I simply feel my best self!
So, are you ready to start your day with a little sweat?! I know you can do this! I can’t wait to hear how this impacts you and your days. Please hop over to Instagram @yourcrazybigdreams and let me know when you’re going to start! Maybe you’re doing this already?! Inspire someone else to enjoy all the benefits it gives by sharing over there.
On the flip side, if you’re struggling with how to shift your morning routine to best serve you, your personal values, and priorities, I invite you to grab a one-time, 90-minute Strategy Session with me where you can get crystal clear, not only on your priorities and values but also individualize your morning intentions.
It’s all about helping you navigate what feels like can’t budge. I love this work. It’s so fun! Because I know how impactful it will be for you once you have your morning intentions set with exactly what works for you, for this current season of life. Go to crazybigdreams.biz/work-with-tammy to explore that option.
I can’t wait! The best is yet to come, friend! Always!
