The Miracle Morning (18 page)

In this short chapter I’ll give you some ideas and strategies for how you can design your
Miracle Morning
and adjust it to fit your lifestyle so it adds value to your life and helps you achieve your most important goals. I’ll also include examples of different real-life
Miracle Mornings
, designed by individuals—from entrepreneurs to stay-at-home moms, to high school and college students—to fit their unique schedules, priorities and lifestyles.

The Miracle Morning
On Weekends

“Waking up early on Saturday gives me an edge in finishing my work with a very relaxed state of mind. There is a feeling of time pressure on weekdays that aren’t there on weekends. If I wake up early in the morning, before anybody else, I can plan the day or at least my activities with relaxed mind.” —Oprah Winfrey

I couldn’t agree with Oprah more. When I first created
The Miracle Morning
I only did it Monday through Friday, and I took the weekends off. It didn’t take long for me to realize that every day I did
The Miracle Morning
I felt better, more fulfilled and more productive, but every day that I slept in, I woke feeling lethargic, unfocused, and unproductive.

Experiment for yourself. You may start, as I did, by doing
The Miracle Morning
during the week and try taking the weekends off. See how you feel on those Saturday and Sunday mornings, sleeping in. If you feel, like many people do, that
every day
is better when you begin it with
The Miracle Morning
, you might just find that weekends are actually your favorite time to do it.

Keeping Your Miracle Morning Fresh, Fun, and Exciting!

Over the years, my
Miracle Morning
continues to evolve. While I still practice the
Life S.A.V.E.R.S.
daily and don’t foresee any reason I would ever stop needing the benefits of those six practices, I do think it’s important to mix things up and keep variety in your
Miracle Morning
. Like a relationship, you always want to keep a little fun and excitement in the mix, so things don’t get boring or stale.

For example, you might change up your morning exercise routine every 90 days, or even monthly. You could try different meditations, either through a simple Google search or by downloading various
Meditation
apps on your phone. You could create a vision board and update it regularly. As I mentioned during the section on Affirmations: you should always be updating your affirmations to stimulate your senses and to be in alignment with your always-evolving vision for who you can and want to be.

I also adjust my
Miracle Morning
on the fly, based on my changing schedule, circumstances, and projects I’m working on. When I’m preparing for an upcoming speech or seminar that I’ll be presenting, I allocate more time during my
Miracle Morning
to practice and rehearse my performance. When I’m traveling, to give speeches for colleges or corporations, and I’m staying in hotels, I adjust my
Miracle Morning
accordingly. For example, if I’m scheduled to give a late night keynote or workshop at a conference, I will move my wake up and start time a little later.

Another example of making adjustments based on my current projects has been during this past few months, as my
Miracle Morning
has ironically been heavily focused on completing this book. I’ve still maintained the
Life S.A.V.E.R.S.
—I’ve just done a shortened version, so I can focus more of my time on writing.

As you can see, you can always design and customize
The Miracle Morning
to fit
your
lifestyle.

Final Thoughts On Customizing Your
Miracle Morning

Humans need variety. It’s important that you keep your
Miracle Morning
feeling fresh and new. As one of my first mentors once told me whenever I complained about my work as a sales rep getting boring, “Whose fault is it that it’s boring? And whose responsibility is it to make it fun again?”  This is a great lesson that I’ve never forgotten. Whether it’s our routines or our relationships, it’s our responsibility to actively and continuously make them the way we want them to be.

Remember, the moment you accept total responsibility for
everything
in your life is the moment you claim the power to change
anything
in your life.

— 9 —

From Unbearable To Unstoppable: The Real Secret To Forming Habits That Will
Transform Your Life (In 30 Days)

Successful people aren’t born that way. They become
successful by establishing the habit of doing things unsuccessful people don’t like to do. The successful people don’t always like doing these things themselves; they just get on and do them.
—DON MARQUIS

Motivation is what gets you started.
Habit is what keeps you going.
—JIM ROHN

I
t’s been said that our quality of life is created by the quality of our habits. If a person is living a successful life, then that person simply has the habits in place that are creating and sustaining their levels of success. On the other hand, if someone is not experiencing the levels of success they want—no matter what the area—they simply haven’t committed to putting the necessary habits in place which will create the results they want.

Considering that our habits create our life, there is arguably no single
skill
that is more important for you to learn and master than controlling your habits. You must identify, implement, and maintain the habits necessary for creating the results you want in your life, while learning how to let go of any negative habits which are holding you back from achieving your true potential.

Habits are behaviors that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously. Whether you realize it or not, your life has been, and will continue to be, created by your habits. If you don’t control your habits, your habits will control you.

Unfortunately, if you’re like the rest of us, you were never taught how to successfully implement and sustain (aka “master”) positive habits. There’s no class offered in school called
Habit Mastery.
There should be. Such a course would probably be more important to your success and overall quality of life than all of the other courses combined.

Because they never learned to master their habits, most people fail at virtually every attempt to control them, time and time again. Take New Year’s Resolutions, for example.

Habitual Failure:  New Year’s Resolutions (NYRs)

Every year, millions of well-intentioned people make New Year’s resolutions, but less than five percent of us stick to them. A NYR is really just a
positive
habit (like exercising or early rising) you want to incorporate into your life, or a
negative
habit (like smoking or eating fast food) you want to get rid of. You don’t need a statistic to tell you that, when it comes to NYRs, most people have already given up and thrown in the towel before January has even come to a close.

Maybe you’ve seen this phenomenon in real time. If you’ve ever gone to the gym the first week of January, you know how difficult it can be to find a parking spot. It’s packed with vehicles owned by people with good intentions, and armed with a NYR to lose weight and get in shape. However, if you go back to the gym closer to the end of the month, you’ll notice that half of the parking lot is empty. Not armed with a proven strategy to stick with their new habits, the majority continue to fail.

Why is it so difficult to implement and sustain the habits we need to be happy, healthy, and successful?

Addicted To The Old:  Change Is Painful

Yes, we are, at some level, addicted to our habits. Whether psychologically or physically, once a habit has been reinforced through enough repetition, it can be very difficult to change. That is, if you don’t have an effective, proven strategy.

One of the primary reasons most people fail to create and sustain new habits is because they don’t know what to expect, and they don’t have a winning strategy.

How Long Does It
Really
Take To Form A New Habit?

Depending on the article you read or which expert you listen to, you’ll hear compelling evidence that it takes anywhere from a single hypnosis session, 21 days, or even up to three months to incorporate a new habit into your life—or get rid of an old one.

The popular 21-day myth may come from the 1960 book
Psycho-Cybernetics:  A New Way To Get More Living Out of Lif
e. Written by cosmetic surgeon Dr. Maxwell Maltz, he found that amputees took, on average, 21 days to adjust to the loss of a limb. He argued that people take 21 days to adjust to any major life changes. Some would argue that how long it takes for a habit to become truly automatic also depends on the difficulty of the habit.

My personal experience and the real-world results I’ve seen working with hundreds of coaching clients has led me to the conclusion that you can change any habit in 30 days, if you have the right strategy. The problem is, most people don’t have any strategy, let alone the right one. So, year after year, they lose confidence in themselves and their ability to improve, as failed attempt after failed attempt piles up and knocks them down. Something has to change.

How can
you
become a master of your habits? How can you take complete control of your life—and your future—by learning how to identify, implement, and sustain any positive habit you want, and permanently remove any negative habit? You’re about to learn the
right
strategy, one most people know nothing about.

One of the biggest obstacles preventing most people from implementing and sustaining positive habits is that they don’t have the right strategy. They don’t know what to expect and aren’t prepared to overcome the mental and emotional challenges that are part of the process of implementing any new habit.

We’ll start by dividing the 30-day time frame necessary to implement a positive new habit (or get rid of an old, negative habit) into three 10-day phases. Each of these phases presents a different set of emotional challenges and mental roadblocks to sticking with the new habit. Since the average person is not aware of these challenges and roadblocks, when they face them, they give up because they don’t know what to do to overcome them.

[Days 1-10] Phase One: 
Unbearable

The first 10 days of implementing any new habit, or ridding yourself of any old habit, can
feel
almost unbearable. Although the first few days can be easy, and even exciting—because it’s something
new
—as soon as the newness wears off, reality sets in. You hate it. It’s painful. It’s not fun anymore. Every fiber of your being tends to resist and reject the change. Your mind rejects it and you think: 
I hate this
. Your body resists it and tells you: 
I don’t like how this feels
.

If your new habit is waking up early (which might be a useful one to get started on, now), during the first 10 days your experience might be something like this:  [The alarm clock sounds]
Oh God, it’s morning already! I don’t want to get up. I’m soooo tired. I need more sleep. Okay, just 10 more minutes.
[Hit snooze button] 

The problem for most people is that they don’t realize that this seemingly unbearable first 10 days is only “temporary.” Instead, they think it’s the way the new habit feels, and will always feel, telling themselves: 
If the new habit is this painful, forget it—it’s not worth it.

As a result, 95% of our society—the mediocre majority—fail, time and time again, to start exercise routines, quit smoking, improve their diets, stick to a budget, or any other habit that would improve their quality of life.

Here’s where you have an advantage over the other 95%. See, when you are
prepared
for these first 10 days, when you know that it is the price you pay for success, that the first 10 days will be challenging but they’re also
temporary
, you can beat the odds and succeed! If the benefits are great enough, we can do anything for 10 days, right?

So, the first 10 days of implementing any new habit aren’t a picnic. You’ll defy it. You might even hate it at times. But
you can do it
. Especially considering, it only gets easier from here, and the reward is, oh—just the ability to create
everything
you want for your life.

[Days 11-20] Phase Two: 
Uncomfortable