"You'll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret to your success is found in your daily routine." -- John C. Maxwell
Your life is the effect of your daily choices, actions, habits and routine.
It is the seemingly small choices you make in your life that add up to produce the biggest, most rewarding, most powerful results.
Lets use reading as an example. You decide to read for an hour before bed every single night. That is sixty minutes a day, or 420 minutes a week, or 1,680 minutes a month, or 20,160 minutes in just one year… or 336 hours by the end of that first year.
What would you become a master at, improve on, or learn if you dedicated an extra 336 hours towards something in just one year?
Would you complete that accounting course? Would you learn how to cook? Would you gain knowledge on how to create more value for your business? Would you learn how to play the guitar?
If it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in something, committing one hour a day for a year sounds like a great head start.
And if you don't believe me that practice matters, let me share with you a couple examples.
Bill Gates would sneak out of his parent’s house when he was a teenager to head to the local University and spend hours programming, before he founded Microsoft.
The Beatles spent hours playing in clubs before anyone even knew who they were. They were underpaid, but got lots of practice time in and were doing what they loved
But it’s easy to think that success happened overnight, when in reality you are seeing the very end of their journey. You missed the 10,000 hours Bill Gates spent at the library programming, you forget the 10,000 hours The Beatles spent playing to empty rooms.
What you never saw was their commitment to repeating the same daily routines day after day after day that added up to a successful life.
Does your daily routine set you up for success?
When you deliberately focus on what matters most to you, you automatically make better choices and create positive change. And a daily declaration can help you focus on what you want most in your life.
A daily declaration is the simplest first step to creating a great life.
As I help walk you through the daily declaration exercise, think of the big picture of your health and your life, in no particular timeline. Ask yourself those big questions...
What do I want to create in my life?
What are my highest values?
What accomplishments do I want to achieve?
What do I want my legacy to be?
What do I want to focus on each and every day?
How do I want to contribute to the world… to others around me… and to myself?
Once you answer these questions, create a paragraph that really moves you. It should make your heart skip a beat, make you sweat a little more, make you get butterflies in your stomach, make you excited to create a life like this.
Write this paragraph in the present tense, in the first person and in the positive, using phrases like "I have", "I am" and "I will." Write as if you already have everything you are working so hard towards.
For example...
Today is a brand new day and I feel amazing. I am healthy, I am happy and I am grateful for this. Today I will approach my family with love and patience. I will put nourishing foods into my body that will give me energy so that I will be focused and productive at work and able to offer tremendous value to my clients. I have created time to cook these foods and to mindfully eat them without distractions or interruptions. Today I will practice self-discipline and choose only healthy foods that will fuel my body and set my day up for success. Today I will share my love and appreciation for my husband and will set a world-class example of how to live a wonderful and abundant life for my children. I will make sure my family feels seen, heard and loved. Today will be an amazing day.
Once you finish creating your daily declaration, take a step back, look deeper at your paragraph and ask yourself questions like...
"How will I approach my family with love and patience?"
"When will I create time to cook nourishing foods and eat mindfully?"
"Why is it important to me to show my love and appreciation towards my children?"
Once you have answered those questions your daily declaration is complete.
Make sure that the paragraph reads so clearly that if someone else were to read it they would know exactly what it is you want out of life.
Now keep your daily declaration in a place that you will see it every single day, beside your bed, on your bathroom mirror, or on your computer desktop, and review it first thing every morning before you start your day.
Congratulations! You have just created one simple daily routine that will help set up your life for success.
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