15 Jan Top Tips for Starting Your Day
Building a daily morning routine will put you in a successful frame of mind and boost your physical energy levels to help you be your best for the day.
Many highly successful people follow a daily morning routine to enable them to achieve their potential and be their best at work and in their personal lives. January is a good time to reassess your routine and enhance your successes.
Start Your Day Early Every Day
It may be tempting to have a lie in especially on a dark winter’s morning but not much is achieved by lying in bed with the snooze button on! Early rising gives you time to assess your tasks and be prepared for your work and personal goals. Leaders and entrepreneurs such as Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz,, Disney CEO Bob Iger, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Virgin America’s CEO David Cush, and Unilever’s CEO Paul Polman are all early risers according to Business Insider research.
Keep the alarm at the same time every morning – both when you are working and at weekends to maintain your sleep routine.
Be Mindful
We covered the benefits of Mindfulness Training with meditation in this eshot exploring the excellent bestselling book by Professor Mark Williams. Building sessions to “be in the moment” is a good daily habit to form and will increase your focus, lower anxiety, improve creativity and boost you physically. It can also be a great benefit to calming your nerves before important meetings or a presentation.
Give yourself five minutes of mindfulness to clear your mind from anxieties and focus on your breathing.
Write Down Your Daily Goals
We know the importance of writing down your affirmations in planning your goals. Writing down daily tasks can break down bigger goals or projects into manageable chunks and you can enjoy the satisfaction that you have crossed off a task. Writing a list enables you to visualise the task as part of the bigger picture, so that you can prioritise tasks within the day. You can also plan your day so that you can be your most productive and work on creative or most difficult tasks when you feel most energised.
Write down a list of your daily goals to achieve and prioritise them.
Eat a healthy breakfast
A healthy breakfast will provide fuel to energise you both physically and mentally. It may be easier to grab a protein bar or even gulp down a ready made cereal in a drink, but we are now more aware of the importance of the gut to digest food to prevent hunger pangs. Taking time to eat a bowl of porridge with fruit, or a protein based breakfast such as scrambled egg will set you up for the day.
Eat a healthy breakfast to fuel your concentration and boost your physical stamina. Being prepared at work with your own “smart snacks” – a banana, some nuts or an oatcake ready packed will mean you can say no to the round of biscuits!
We all have different times of the day when we work at our optimum level or prefer to exercise. However, we all have deadlines to meet and important interviews or presentations which are not always scheduled at our “best” time. Maintaining a daily morning routine gives us the best chance to approach the day, energised to tackle its challenges and achieve our true potential.