It's All About the Bookends Baby!!!
Your Day Must Start and End with YOU
The bookends of your day, the beginning and the ending, when your eyes first crack open to greet the day and the moments before your head hits the pillow. I never paid much attention to them until a few years ago, and once I started owning my bookends the middle of my day became infinitely better.
Morning – Be Proactive not Reactive
I use to get up as late as I could, not eat, grab a coffee, have absolutely no time for pooping and drive like a crazy woman who was late for work. I was completely stressed out from the moment I pushed the covers off, shouldering that unneeded stress throughout the rest of my day. I thought the stress was coming from the external world, “why is there so much traffic, ugh I’m going to have to hold my poop in all day now, and why is everything always outside of my control”? Really, me not getting up with enough time to poop is the world’s fault, or the traffic was the reason why I was running late…nothing to do with the time I left the house? What this did was put me into a REACTIVE state, everything was just flying at me, and I couldn’t figure out why, and that reactive mindset remained with me throughout the rest of the day.
Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
You want to start your day PROACTIVELY, meaning wake up before any other obligations are placed on you, it’s like giving yourself a head-start. You want to make sure that you use this time for YOU, to take care of you and your mindset so when you are serving others you’re not serving from an empty cup.
Personally, I wake up 90 minutes before I need to, YES even when I was working at the gym with a 60-minute commute to meet a 7am client, I woke up at 4:30am. My morning consists of: snuggles/walks with Padawan (puppy), eating breakfast, getting that all-important poop in and listening to or reading material that ensures my mindset has been taken care of. When I did have a commute, 60 minutes of Zig Ziglar, Brene Brown, Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins etc. anything that reminded me of how glorious it is to be alive and how much power I have over my life. Since I’m working from home now, I have mommy puppy reading time, when I read aloud (yes truly) to Padawan currently it’s been Og Mandino’s “The Greatest Salesman in the World”.
Bedtime – Snug as a Bug in a Rug
Starting my day with a reactive mindset, meant that by evening I’d come home absolutely drained, frustrated, uncomfortable (poop still needed to happen) and apathetic about my life. I would have a completely unsatisfying visit to the loo, shower, change and plop down on the couch to eat dinner and zone out to the TV. Even though I was tired I refused to go to bed, because this is my time, this is all I have for ME and dammit I’m not going to bed early just to wake up early. Let’s just remind ourselves that we’re adults and have been for some time, defiantly staying up past our bedtime proves nothing, except that we may still be childish in certain respects.
Realizing the correlation between late nights and reactive mornings I started to take that same proactive approach with my nighttime ritual. I start shutting down an hour before lights out: one last stroll in the yard with the pup, head upstairs for end of day hygiene, meditate for 15 minutes, write down my gratitude, quickly finish anything on social media, then pick up a book and read for 20 minutes or so. All of this is lulling me to sleep, the gratitude reminds me of everything that’s wonderful in the world, and reading a book allows me to control exactly what goes into my mind before light’s out.
If you’re still rebelling against this idea (throw a temper tantrum and then), just try it out for a week, observe your mindset, how your day unfolds, and let me know! I’d love to hear how you decided to own your day, what changes you made and how those variations changed you!
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