At the beginning of the year, one of the goals I set myself was to read a book each week. This weeks book review is on Hal Elrod’s book, The Miracle Morning.
What it’s about
Hal Elrod has developed a series of habits that you complete each morning (before 8am) that will set you up for the day.
These habits can be done in any order and over a period of time that suits you, so whilst he starts out suggesting taking 1 hour to complete all the habits, you can do 1 minute for each habit and still get some results. The idea is to take action, however small.
The 6 habits, which he’s called “S.A.V.E.R.S” are:
- Silence. Take time out first thing for some silence meditation.
- Affirmations. Repeat some positive affirmations to build positive beliefs.
- Visualisation. Visualise your day. Visualise where you want to be and how you’re going to get there. Visualise your goal and what it will look like as you complete it, and what it will be like once you have achieved it.
- Exercise. This can be a simple walk, yoga, tai chi or anything that gets you moving.
- Reading. Personally, I love reading, so taking the time to read first thing in the morning would be great.
- Scribing. Taking the time each morning to write down your thoughts, for example in a journal.
Why I loved this book
I really enjoyed reading about Hal’s journey and how two life events shaped where he is now, and how he came to develop the habits himself.
The habits themselves make great sense. Positive psychology has show that the brain is elastic and each of these habits has a positive effect, so grouping them together and starting the day this way makes perfect sense to me.
When you do a Google search of “Miracle morning” you’ll find loads of different articles by people who have used this technique and benefited greatly.
How I’m going to integrate this in my life
Over the past 3 months, I’ve developed my own morning ritual of:
- make a cup of tea
- take my medication
- write my gratitude journal
- watch a TED talk
- have a shower
- make breakfast, usually porridge
By getting up a little earlier, I can adjust this to incorporate the other habits. I’ll need to give it a try to work out what works for me, however, I’ve wanted to incorporate meditation and yoga into my morning routine for a while and haven’t gotten round to it, so now’s the time to take action.
I also have an app on my tablet with a series of positive affirmations that I can read.
So the only thing that I’ll need to work on more is visualisation.
Finally
This is one of those books that I would definitely recommend that you read. However, the whole point of the book is for you to take action, so try out the habits yourself, and see how you get on, even if you just take 6 minutes in the morning and do 1 minute of each habit to start with. Use Shawn Achor 20 secs technique and make it as easy as possible, so for example, have a guide meditation app, a positive affirmation app, the Kindle app for reading, the Bliss app for journaling and then do some exercise.
Take care for now
Karen x