Creative and productive mornings lead to creative and productive days. These are 6 morning habits that can transform your life:

Silence

Spend some time in silence, focusing on your breathing and being in the present moment. Letting go of all the thoughts that come to your mind and just sensing your body, the air. It can be in forms of meditation, prayer, deep breathing or just reflection and gratitude for life.

Affirmations

Clarify what you want in your life, why you want it and what you need to consistently do and be to experience the life you really want. Create sentences, that have the emotional charge to create powerful beliefs about life.

Some examples that I have in my affirmation list:

Creative ideas come easily and frequently.

I am in alignment with my purpose and mission.

I meet the right people and we have the right conversations.

….

Read your affirmations out loud and incorporate your physiology to create a stronger mind-body connection.

Visualization

Top athletes use visualization to enhance their performance by imagining how they perform. Clarify what do you really want in your life. What are your big goals, deepest desires and lifechanging dreams?

Visualize yourself having achieved that dream and also visualize yourself doing and enjoying the work that needs to be done to achieve it. That last part is something that we tend to forget, but it is a vital part, because actions and great work is the vehicle that transports us towards our dreams.

Exercise

Exercise gets your blood flowing and supplies your body with fresh oxygen. For intense mental work you need to balance it with physical movement. What´s your favorite sports? Yoga, running, walking, lifting, cycling, swimming, skiing, dancing? It only takes a minute to do 10 push-ups or jumping jacks.

I wake myself every day doing Sun salutations, it´s a series of stretches that wake my body. Another popular option is 5 Tibetan rites. Living in a Nordic climate means that my morning exercise has to be weather-proof and that´s why I can guarantee a good wake-up with these exercises every morning.

Reading

If you were to read 10 pages a day, then in a year you have  read 3650 pages. That´s about 18 books. If you would read 18 books in the next upcoming 12 months, would that have a positive impact on your life?

When choosing a book, ask yourself: “What do I want go gain from this book? How do I want to apply it?”. During your morning reads, try to get a specific idea from a book that you could apply the same day.

Scribing

Writing is a powerful tool for creating clarity in life to reflect on your discoveries, ideas and achievements. It´s like therapy with yourself. You can write about what you are grateful for, what you want to improve in your life, plan for actions you want to take or just keep a diary where you mark the interesting things that you experienced during the previous day.

Many creatives use morning pages to clear their mind. With morning pages you just write 3 pages of whatever comes to your mind. Don´t worry about spelling errors, your handwriting or the structure of thoughts, just write. It can be difficult in the beginning, but once you get it going, you´ll be surprised about the writing flow you´ll begin to develop.

Try out journalling and learn to know yourself.

How to put these habits into practice?

I made a sticky note for each habit and kept it in my sight so that it would be easy to remember to apply all habits in the morning. Before going to sleep at night, I set my exercise clothes, affirmations page and diary ready. This way it was easier to start with the habits in the morning, because everything was already set and ready for action.

I would personally recommend start applying these new habits while being on vacation or on weekends, where you don´t have to rush anywhere. And once you get it going, then adopting it to your normal workdays. You can also choose one habit to start with and after you get used to that, start adding other habits.

I wish you miracelous mornings 🙂