2023 March 28 Start your day full of life, vision, joy, and energy!

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me tonight. We're going to talk about starting your day off strong. So let's get started. If you like what you hear tonight, please leave a like and tell your friends or send me a message.

This week we're going to go back to our envisionment process, and we're going to talk a little bit about how to start your day off on the right foot every day, not by chance, but on purpose. Recall that I recently spent about four days attending a virtual Tony Robbins seminar, Unleash Your Power Within.

Tony Robbins is an amazing life coach, business person, all around interesting and incredibly motivating person. There were about a thousand takeaways, literally, but the one I'm going to talk about tonight is Tony Robbins morning priming ritual.  I know there are books on the subject like The Morning Miracle by Hal Elrod and lots of Morning Minute Retreats and things like that.

Tony, in being a person who is actively advancing his life (and your life), Tony's priming ritual is much more proactive and inclusive, for all parts of your body, not just thinking and meditating. You can find a video on it here: https://www.tonyrobbins.com/ask-tony/priming. It seems simple, but the core piece of it is like I said before. A lot of times, you start your day and if things go well, you say, Oh, it's going to be a good day. And if things don't go well, you say, Oh, it's going to be a bad day. I got up, I kicked the bed frame, and now my toe hurts. So it's going to be a bad day. But by going through a priming ritual like he goes through, you can proactively program your day and set the trajectory in the way you want it to actually go. 

One of the big differences is the whole physical aspect to it. You might remember that a while back, I made a little pamphlet focusing on what's good about the day. Today I'll be, today I'll feel, it's all very neat. I happen to read the gospel every morning, so there’s a summary about today's gospel. Life is good.

On the inside, there's a place for the one thing that is most important for the day, and all the things to lay out your day. Then on the back page, the ideas that came up today, any new challenges that arrived, and a summary of what happened today, plus things to plan for tomorrow. Those are very mental, in your head, so it's a nice plan, because it helps me focus. It didn't really set a tone for the day though, and I thought about it. I got some good ideas, and I did use it for a while, wrote down ideas on the back, and those were all good. 

But I attended two Tony Robbins events, and one of the things I realized after attending them (and also I'd gone through the same thing, not quite to the same degree, but also with James Webmore) was how much body movement has upon your attitude. We're all creatures that are meant to move, really move, not move in my chair, but really get up and move, and walk and run and do things. When we do that, it improves our circulation. It makes our limb system work better, which is super important and improves the oxygen in our bloodstream.

That makes our brain happy. A happy limb system also makes our brain happy. It has a lot of beneficial effects when we actually get up and move. Very interestingly, if you're doing something sedentary, working at your computer, doing a podcast, whatever you're doing, and then you get up and do something, it effectively ends the paragraph - if you want to think in terms of writing, of what you were working on, of our current thoughts and allows us to start a new paragraph with a new train of thought. 

It's kind of interesting how that happens. I don't know if you have ever done any running or serious walking, but you get to the trail head, or you get ready to start running, maybe you and somebody else are talking about a bunch of things. Very often once you start to run, your whole thought process changes and you're working on a whole new subject. It wasn't like, I'm going to start to run, I'm going to start something new. It's that suddenly you went from being basically inactive to active and your mind reacts to that, so it brings you into a whole new state. 

I realized that in my little morning ritual routine pamphlet here, the thing that was missing was motion, there was no activity, so I didn't really bring it inside myself. I wrote it down. I spent five minutes doing it, and it was fine. But five minutes after those five minutes ended, I probably couldn't tell you most of what I wrote down. 

The whole process as it's laid out by Tony Robbins only takes about 10 minutes. It's short deliberately so you can't use the excuse that you don’t have the time to do it. Realistically, if you can't fit ten minutes of self-care into your morning routine, you should probably be reexamining how you're prioritizing the start of your day, because self-care is super important. We've talked about this before.

So instead of just starting off thinking nice thoughts like I was trying to do before, Tony Robbins’ method instead starts off with something physical: three sets of explosive breaths and arm pumps. You do that for a minute, in three sets each, about 20 seconds long. Interestingly enough, that little bit of exercise is enough to change your physiology and allow your brain to be open to new thoughts.

That's immediately followed by three one-minute periods of thinking about three separate things that you can be grateful for or appreciative about. It's only three so you can spend a full minute on each one, thinking about the details, really envisioning it, thinking about why this is a good thing.

One of the things that I make a point of trying not to do - I don't plan out this stuff in. I try to get my mind fairly blank. I actually start off before anything else with the 15 second warmup period. I actually use a little timer, where I just do nothing and clear my head.

Then I do the explosive breaths, and then I go into the three things to think about, something to be appreciative about or something good that happened. Since I don't have them pre-planned, it's whatever flows into my mind. It's really pretty neat, because there's a lot of things that often show up that I haven't thought about in a very long time.

If I tried to plan them out in advance, I'd be very logical and think, well, what happened yesterday that I was happy about. But just by letting them flow into my mind, then I end up with many more things to draw on, and then I can spend and think about the details and remember why it was something to be appreciative about, why I could be grateful about it.

It's very enlightening when you do that, because you suddenly realize things from before that maybe at the time you were kind of happy about, but which you didn't really sit and realize all the effects, the follow on effects of why you could appreciate it. So try and clear your mind 3 one-minute periods of what you can be appreciative about.

It's important to note that they don't have to be amazing or huge. You walked in the house yesterday, and you saw a really pretty leaf on the tree. That's fine. Think about every aspect of that. Think about how that leaf came to be on the tree, how the tree came to be in the lawn, how the leaf changed color, how the breeze felt.

Just focus on something that you find appreciative, where you can be grateful for. Then do it two more times, three in total. It of course can be something huge, but it doesn't have to be. There's a lot of things in life that you can find even a little bit of pleasure in, and when you think about them, you realize they're actually kind of amazing, like the leaf. The fact that the leaf turned those colors and you happen to see it.

Try to keep finding new things every day. Pretty soon, your brain will start to realize how many little good things happen that we otherwise might not notice. Again, getting back to just being in the present and being mindful of what we see go by us in life. Take three one-minute intervals to feel the energy of the world, nature, God - however you want to envision life force and how it energizes you. Feel it flowing down from above through your head, through your heart, to your body, all the way down into the ground and into the earth, and then back out, cleansing you on the way back.

I only do this twice because I like to do it once for me and once for the rest of the world. Tony recommends doing it three times, twice for you and once for the rest of the world. I'll talk about this in a second. Feel free to tweak this, whatever makes you feel most energized. The important part is, on that last time, whether it's the second or third time, take all that energy that comes in, and when it comes back out as it gets to your heart, send it out to all the people who matter to you. It could be somebody you saw recently, somebody you don't even know personally, kind of like, Oh, I saw an accident on the road. I hope those people are well, that they weren't seriously injured. Send the energy out to the people of Ukraine to keep them safe and to have life go as well as it can be.

Whatever matters to you, send it out to those people. People you haven't seen in a while, people you saw yesterday. Now I take a little one minute spot and I say a little prayer. You can say a chant if you'd like to thank God, or whoever guides you, for the good things you've discovered.

I realized that I remembered three things that I'd forgotten about. Thank you very much for the person who you knew was sick and now they got better. Thank you very much that I remembered to get gas and didn't run out of gas because I got on the highway and the gas station was closed.

Whatever it is that you can be thankful for, just recognize it and say thanks for letting that happen. If you have something special to pray for, to ask for, to focus on, now is also a good time to do it. Then do three more one minute intervals, but this time is for the three goals that are on top of your priority list.

Now we're getting out of the mindset for our overall happiness and more into how to reach the happiness that we're trying to attain over the short period of time. Remember how important it is to have goals in your life that you want to attain that are consistent with how you really want to live your life.

This is an opportunity now. You have three more one-minute intervals to take three goals, the ones on the top of your priority list. You really want to envision those goals. You want to envision how you can put all of that together and take whatever the next step is to bring it closer there. At some point, envision having that goal completed, you're done. It was never at risk. It was an  unavoidable success you had. There were no other alternatives. 

To be successful in this endeavor, think about all the feelings and emotions that you now feel since you've attained them, and get your brain used to having successfully attained what you wanted to do to reach your goal, to get to your real life envisionment point. Remember, this is the core of all our envisionment processes. I don't like to use the word to trick your brain, but it's to help your brain realize the things it was trying to keep you safe from may not be something you want to be kept safe from. It's something that is really important that you attain. So then your brain will start working to help you get to that point. So that's the last three one-minute intervals. Now we’re about nine and a half minutes in.

Then finally you can do one last one-minute interval. Thinking about something that you're totally proud of or pleased to have accomplished, or some positive outcome you helped create, or some other positive thing in which you played some part. Again, imagine it. Imagine it if it's happening now, imagine how it made you feel. Remember how it made you feel to help someone else, and knowing that you helped someone else. 

This is kind of the whole closing piece of it now. You started off, you changed your physiology to get your brain to open its mind to new thoughts. You thought of three good things, perhaps then went and thanked a creator, nature, whomever, for the good things that happened to you. You went through, did the energy, and felt the energy that life has to offer you, and then shared it with other people. So it's not just about you, but it's about everyone who matters to you.

Then you went through and set three goals, and finally wrapped it all up with something that you've already done. This is getting your brain to realize that you have accomplished a lot of really good things. We can do more good things. We have the ability to do more. The whole point of this is to start your day off on a trajectory where you really want to start off doing things from a point of positivity and power rather than hope or chance.

Hope has no real definitive outcome, just by luck that something goes well. This is taking an active role in your own life and in your own day, and setting it off on a trajectory towards success.

At the end of this, I take another 15 seconds just to clear my head of any thoughts.  Then I start the rest of my morning. I find it helps a lot to bracket it, start and finish by just trying to clear my head. Then it's not, Okay, I got these goals done. I have to go do something. It's, I got these goals done, they're in my brain. My brain will work on them. It knows what to do, and I can now clear my head and start off on the rest of the routine for my morning, but starting off now from a very positive point of view, it only takes a few minutes and I can personally tell you it makes a huge difference in how you start your day. 

At least it does for me, because instead of starting out all stressed about the things you didn't get done yesterday, or how you’re going to get it all done, or all the stuff we normally load ourselves up with first thing in the morning. Instead, you start out with gratitude and a plan of action to work on your priority goals for the day. What a huge difference that makes. 

I also noticed, quite by accident, that about halfway through the initial explosive breaths, my whole posture changes. I don't do it on purpose. The first time it happened, it was weird. Something just changed. But suddenly I'll be sitting there and I'll be thinking about stuff and I'll be doing these explosive breaths.  and my shoulders go back, my sternum comes out to the power posture pose. It's like, Wow. I'm doing something different. I'm not starting off the day with dread or thinking about other things I have to do. I'm starting off from a position of power, a position of control. I sit up straight. I already feel energized, and I've barely begun my day. It's great and it's easy. I encourage you to watch the video and the link.

I often tweak the whole process a little bit, depending on how I feel. Whatever makes you feel most comfortable, most energized, most in touch with that which controls you. I would encourage you to do the same, but please don't skip the physical aspects of it. The breathing and the arm movements, the physiology aspects of it are very important to get your mind into that proper frame of reference. This is super important. It's not just the specific priming. Perhaps even more important is that you are actively deciding to take even a small amount of your day to care for yourself.

That's the really big thing. Self-care is super important. You need to be able to be fully present in your own life if you're going to be fully present for other people in your life. The decision to care for yourself is a super important step to making your day something special, and it's another reason to celebrate the start of your day.

So that's it. I hope you got some value from it. We spend a lot of time talking about a little tiny, small part of the day, but it's an extremely important part of the day.

Think about it. If you think about any of the old games you used to play, throwing snowballs, throwing water balloons, trajectory makes a big difference. You don't have to move where you throw something by very much to clock your brother on the head with a water balloon or completely miss him. This is just adjusting the trajectory, the start of your day. So instead of starting off kind of low and hoping you don't hit the ground, we're starting off energized and ready to go off and really make a huge difference in our day and in the world.

There's a lot more to be said on it, and maybe we'll do another episode on it, but I really hope you consider starting your day off this way and start it off right. Hit the ground running, full of life and vision and joy and energy. It's a totally uplifting way to start your day, and I really think that you'll find it makes a huge difference. It doesn't mean your day's going to go perfect, but when you do hit those challenges, you'll have a different viewpoint and you'll be much more likely just to power through them. 

So that's it. Thank you very much. Happy envisioning and creating a new future. I wish you a wonderful morning tomorrow morning.

Please remember the war in Ukraine, as always, that’s just dragging on and dragging on. People need support tremendously. There are lots of ways to do it. UKR7.com has lots of links that you can look at. There's a link there to the World Central Kitchen: WCK.org. They do just meals. If you want something that's guaranteed humanitarian, they're an awesome group. There's a lot of other links there, as well. Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. If you can and you're able, or if someone else is looking for a way to donate, check it out. You can send them there and check it out. 

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along. Please hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear.

Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.