Mornings are one of the most powerful energetic assets we have…what are you doing with yours? This week we’ll be exploring how to build a morning routine that maximizes every aspect of your business and life. Not a morning person or short on time? Have no fear! I’ll share how making tiny 5 minute efforts toward four key activities – meditation, journaling, reading, and moving my body – led me to a morning routine that has completely changed my life.

Read transcript below:

Steve Napolitan: Welcome to More Business More Life Daily. And this week I want to talk about my morning routine, and today I’m going to just go over the whole thing. So let’s jump into it.

So my morning routines, I mean, well first off, I just have to say that mornings are one of our most powerful times of our day, because when we think about it, when we get going in our day, we start to deplete some of our energy levels, or things come our way, and some things might be positive or negative. And so what’s most important is when we’re fully recovered, hopefully you’ve got a good night’s sleep. So a great morning starts with a good night’s sleep. And I used to get a lot less than six hours of sleep when I was a workaholic, and working, and I’d plow through with extra caffeine, and then I would just crash at night. And now what I try to do is get a minimum of seven and a half hours of sleep. I’ve found, and it’s going to be different for everyone, but they are even saying, my wife was telling me she was reading an article, they were doing a study of people with automobile accidents, and they’re noticing more and more automobile accidents happen with people that have slept less than seven hours of sleep.

So it’s interesting these correlations, because I do find myself to be in my most power when I get about seven and a half hours of sleep. And pretty much once I started doing this, I would actually, I do, most of the time wake up before my alarm goes off. So if I need to be up, then I’ll set an alarm. But ultimately, many times these days, I wake up and then turn my alarm off before it goes off. And I’m getting about that seven and a half hours of sleep. So now what I said I was going to talk about is my morning routine. Once I wake up, then I do four things. And what I’m going to do the rest of this week is talk about those four things in more detail. But number one, I meditate. Number two, I journal. Number three I read, and number four I work out, I do some sort of movement. So meditate, journal, read, and work and move my body. Those four things are a daily must.

For me, they are for me, and I’m going to tell you how incrementally, how those got in the coming videos here, but I want you to understand that I didn’t just start doing this with flying fantastic results, and everything was working fantastic. I did this in increments. And I also, the biggest thing that I could give you right now, is I gave myself permission to do it in small chunks. And this really started with working out. Working out in meditation kind of happened at the same time. I just gave myself five minutes of self reflection, which I’ll talk about on the meditation video this week. But I gave myself time to find my gratitude. What did I want from that day, in just five minutes. And about that same time, I was like, well, why don’t I do this with working out?

Because prior to that, when I was early in basically going through high school, college, I would work out, and I was playing hockey at that time, but most of the time my gym workouts were about 90 minutes, and I had a routine, and as life got busy and as I started my businesses, going through my twenties I got to the point where 90 minutes just wasn’t going to happen at that time. And, and I was just… put myself in the mindset that I had to go to work and I cut that out of my life. And getting it back into my life wasn’t the easiest thing. I tried here and there, and what worked was working out for five minutes. So I would meditate for five minutes, and then work out for five minutes. So that’s how this started. I didn’t journal or read at that time, and I’ll tell you why later. But basically I just started with those two chunks.

And when I started doing the five minute workout, it was amazing. Just doing a minute of jumping jacks, a minute of pushups, just a minute of running in place, or different things. Or I would do some sit ups or a plank. If you don’t know some of those workouts, it’s okay, but you can start to look these up. Even just five minutes of yoga, just certain stretches, positions, I just made sure that I moved my body if for five minutes when I woke up. And then I’d hit the shower. And with that, it started to change my life. I started to feel better in my body, and then I started to add time, and I was actually able to wake up earlier because I had more energy through the day because I started my day off right. And this started to manifest the full routine. So again, we want to do this. Even if you did all four of these in five minutes, that would be a 20 minute routine. So five minutes of meditating, five minutes of working, and whatever order I flip flop this, I’ll talk about the order later.

But five minutes of meditation, five minutes of working out, five minutes of reading, and five minutes of journaling, and in any which order makes sense to you. Then you can start having a really powerful morning. And so what I’m going to do, again, I keep repeating myself, but I’m going to set it up. So tomorrow I’m going to talk about meditation first, and the impact that’s made, and then how you can get started. So this is kind of a quick tutorial on how you can actually start this morning routine, and the power that I’ve gained from it. I’ll let you know the results as we go through the week. So I hope this will be useful for you. So tune in tomorrow, and we’ll dive in one by one into these four areas this week. I look forward to serving you, and as always, remember, choose gratitude, and create freedom.