Let’s be honest, most of us start the day passively. You wake up late, skip breakfast and rush to work, hoping you will get there on time. This leads to a very reactive life. Practicing a daily morning routine will help you feel great and tackle your day more proactively.

A daily morning routine programs your day for success. It helps you create positive habits, develop the right mindset to achieve your goals, and overall feel better about the day. Highly successful people recognize how invaluable a daily morning routine can be.

In this article, you will learn the best daily morning routine for an outstanding life. Practice these healthy morning habits today and become more productive and successful.

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What is a Daily Morning Routine?

A daily morning routine is something that you do early in the morning before anything else. Its purpose is to program your day for success. Getting yourself in the right mindset early in the day develops new habits and helps you in achieving your goals. It gives you the time to work on your personal development consistently.

Many of us start our days very reactive. Maybe we get out of bed late and rush to get to work. Then at work, you’re already stressed and reacting to people and situations. This leads to living a very reactive life. Getting up earlier and doing a morning routine gives you the ability to start the day proactively.

A daily morning routine is a great way to do the activities that are important to you early in the day. Maybe you want to exercise or meditate or repeat affirmations. Perhaps its reading and learning. If you do these activities early in the day, you can have a guilt free day because you’ve already done those things that you should or want to do.

The Daily Morning Routines of Successful People

What are the most successful people doing in the morning to achieve their goals and live an outstanding life? This was a question that Hal Elrod was very interested in answering. He researched many of the most successful people in the world to find out what they did in the mornings. He found out they did a lot of different things. However, he also identified several morning activities that many of them did.

What do most successful people do in the mornings?

From his research, he identified 6 main things that most successful people did in the morning. He came up with the acronym of S. A. V. E. R. S.

• S is for silence or meditation. Many of the most successful people in the world meditate daily.
• A is for affirmations or mantras. Many successful people repeat positive mantras every day.
• V is for visualization. They also do some kind of goal-directed visualization, consciously or unconsciously.
• E is for exercise. Again, most successful people have some kind of exercise ritual built into their morning routine.
• R is for reading and learning.
• S is for scribing, which is journaling or writing.

How long should a daily morning routine be?

It’s entirely up to you. The longer you do it the more benefit you’ll get from it. It could be 5, 10, 15 minutes, half an hour or even an hour. Whatever it is, focus on these 6 areas and aim to put an equal amount of time into each of them. However, you might sometimes prefer to spend more time on one area rather than another.

S. A. V. E. R. S.

1. Silence or Meditation

The goal of meditation is to still your mind, be mindful and able to focus completely on the present. Here are some simple ways to do this.

Focus on your breathing

Sit comfortably and focus on breathing in and breathing out. Whenever you notice your mind wandering, bring it back to your breath.

Chant

You could chant something like “om” and focus on the sound you are making.

Repeat a certain word

My favorite word is “release”. Every 2 or 3 seconds, you could say “release”. Focus your mind entirely on that word. I learnt this one from Brendon Burchard.

Counting

You could count from 1 to 100 whilst being completely focused on that.

Listen to a guided meditation recording

It could be one you’ve recorded yourself, or one of the many wonderful guided meditation recordings that are available. There are lots of different apps you can get for your phone that have guided meditations.

Whatever you do, remember your mind needs to focus on something specific. You don’t want to sit there and daydream for 5 minutes because that’s the same as being in bed! It’s also not thinking about what you must do during the day. You want to focus your mind on something different. This will prevent your mind from doing its normal everyday thinking and be completely in the present instead.

2. Affirmations or Mantras

This one is about repeating affirmations, mantras, or incantations. These are positive phrases about you, not any specific goal. A great tip is to base your affirmations on being happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise, in that order.
In many cases, the reason for achieving goals in life is to make us happy. Focusing on happiness is often a great shortcut to feeling happy.
Affirmations for health are important because it’s very hard to achieve things (or be happy) when your physical body is in pain or discomfort.

Repeating affirmations for money and wealth will help you create the money to do the things you want to do in life.

Then finally, create some affirmations about being wise, intelligent or knowledgeable.

Affirmation Tips

I highly recommend repeating affirmations out loud whenever you can. You could also record your affirmations and play them back to yourself. There’s a great app to do this called ThinkUp. This app allows you to record affirmations in your own voice and then put your own choice of background music.

Sometimes, when you repeat affirmations, a great idea comes to your mind. When that happens, start repeating that new idea as well, and incorporate it into your affirmations.

Affirmations are great because they help you believe and feel that you’re okay about yourself, that you’re a good person, and that life is going well. Over time, you will become a better person and you will have a better life.

3. Visualization

So affirmations help you become a better person by focusing on positive mindset traits. Positive visualization is more about helping you achieve and accomplish specific goals.

Goals and Measurable Outcomes

Creative Visualization works best when you focus on 1 key goal. If you have several goals in life, then focus on a different goal each morning.

For your specific goal, make sure you have a clear, measurable outcome so you’ll know when you achieve it. Also include why you want to achieve that goal, and how you will achieve it. If you want more help with setting goals, then check out my article about goal setting.

Occasionally visualizing your goals can be enough to get the Law of Attraction into action and manifest the desired outcome quickly. But that’s fairly unusual. Usually it takes time and you have to focus on the why, the how, and the what. That allows you to develop and increase your energy and vibration level, so you’re more likely to attract what you need into your life.

Visualization Tips

When visualizing, I encourage you to speak it out loud as you’re doing it. I’ve tried in the past to close my eyes and visualize a goal for 5 to 10 minutes. I find it easy for my mind to wander onto other things. But if you speak out what you’re visualizing, your mind will really focus on that.

Another great way is to record yourself. Record the visualization and play it back. Some people use vision boards and that can be very effective. Whatever type of visualization process you do, make sure you include a specific action that you will do today. This will help you get one step closer to achieving your goal.

4. Exercise and Movement

This is about exercising or doing some kind of movement every day. What you do can vary from day to day. Here are some examples of the things you could do:

1. 5 x 1-minute workouts – for example, starting with a plank, then press-ups, crunches, jumping jacks and squats for 1 minute each.
2. Go for a walk.
3. Run for 5 to 10 minutes.
4. Do yoga or stretching.

This doesn’t have to be very energetic. Sometimes just some stretching can be very beneficial. If you’re pushed for time, you could combine the affirmations and the exercising together.

And although you might plan to do a longer exercise routine later in the day, if for any reason that doesn’t happen, at least you can say, “I’ve done my 5 minutes of exercise”. It helps prevent you from feeling guilty later in the day for the things that you should have done.

5. Reading, Listening, or Watching

This refers to consuming some kind of content that will inspire, motivate, uplift, or help you learn something new.

You want it to be educational and help you move forward in your life. It should move you closer to achieving your goals. It could be learning about:

• new marketing tools
• new sales techniques
• new computer software
• new therapeutic techniques that you can use on yourself or other people
• new personal development techniques, like NLP or hypnosis.
• something religious or spiritual.

Podcasts or Audio Books

Besides reading, you could listen to podcasts, or audio books. Audible.com is a great source of audio books nowadays. If you’re listening, try to focus on what you’re listening to. I listen to a lot of things on the go and I find that I don’t retain the information as deeply as when I set aside a few minutes to listen to something and do nothing else.

YouTube Videos or Courses

You could watch relevant YouTube videos, or an online course that you have invested in. Again, watching 10 minutes of the video content works much better if you focus completely on it rather than watching it while you’re doing other things.

Whatever you do, whether it’s reading, listening, or watching, make sure it’s aligned with your goals. Look for content that will make you more productive or give you greater positivity during the day.

6. Scribing—Writing and Journaling

There are many activities you could do here. The easiest way to start is doing a gratitude journal.

Gratitude Journal

Take 5 minutes to write all the things you’re grateful for in your life right now. List it all down and be as creative as you can. You can be grateful for and write about:

• waking up and being here for another day
• your health – what’s good about your health
• the people in your life – your partner, family, kids
• your job or career – what you like about it
• what you have achieved in the past and how good that makes you feel now

Express Thoughts and Feelings on Paper

Other things you could do is express your thoughts, feelings, and ideas on paper. Getting something out of your head and putting it onto paper makes it seem more real. Once you get limiting or negative thoughts and feelings out of your head, it’s a lot easier to challenge them, question them and come up with new ideas. It’s also a very good way of releasing emotions. Get it out on paper, out of your system. When it’s on paper, it seems less overwhelming.

Statement of Intent

Another great thing you could do is write your statements of intent. Here are some examples.

• How would you like your day to be?
• What are your intentions for today?
• What are the positive things you want to happen today?

Rather than focusing on what you think will happen today, focus on what you ideally want to happen.

Inspirational Quotes

You could write down your favorite inspirational quotes. Even a whole passage from a book you’ve enjoyed or found inspirational. Writing it out several times will impress it on your unconscious mind and memory more deeply.

There are a lot of different activities you could do, and the key is to vary it. Maybe one day you do a gratitude journal, another day you write your goals down, or express your thoughts and feelings.

Write or Type?

The final question is, do you write it or do you type it? There are lots of different opinions on this. If you write something by hand, it goes more deeply into your unconscious mind. But if you have terrible handwriting like I do, typing might be better. Typing into something like Evernote enables you to refer to it easily on multiple devices throughout the day. Decide what’s best for you.

Practical Tips

Here are some practical tips to help you develop a great daily morning routine:

1. Decide how long it will be

You could have a 6-minute morning routine and spend 1 minute on each of the 6 areas. Or a 30-minute routine, 5 minutes on each of the 6 areas. Or spend 10 minutes on each area and make it 1 hour.

This could vary from day to day. Maybe you could do a longer routine at the weekends.

2. Get yourself out of bed instantly!

The best way to do this is to put your alarm clock away from your bed so that when your alarm clock goes off, you have to get out of bed to turn it off. That’s a great tip. When I started doing morning routines, that was the one thing that made a huge difference for me.

3. Brush your teeth

As soon as you’ve got out of bed and turned off that alarm clock, brush your teeth!

There’s something about brushing your teeth that helps you wake up. It makes you feel fresh.

4. Get into comfortable exercise clothing

Put these clothes out before you go to bed, so you can get into them as soon as you get up. Use these exercise clothes for your daily morning routine only. When you put these clothes on, your body knows that it’s time for your morning ritual.

5. Go outside

If you’re not comfortable repeating affirmations out loud or chanting when you’re meditating because there are other people in the house, consider doing it outside. You could go for a half-hour walk in the morning and incorporate these things in the local park.

6. Try it for 30 days

Do a daily morning routine for 30 consecutive days. That’s long enough for you to see the benefits of doing it. It’s also long enough to experience occasional days when you’ll feel resistance, like you don’t want to do it. As it becomes more of a habit, you’ll find it easier to do your morning routine on those days when you don’t want to do it. After 30 days, you can decide whether it’s something you want to keep doing.

Resources

If you want to get much deeper into morning routines and morning rituals, I recommend checking out these 2 resources. The first is The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. This is the book that goes through the S.A.V.E.R. S. process that I talked about in this article. I actually learned this from Andrew Parr in a recent webinar that he did for his online hypnotherapy diploma program.

The other is the program Morning Ritual Mastery by Stefan James at Project Life Mastery. This course helped me initially develop my morning routines. Stephan’s approach is somewhat different. He focuses on doing something for your body, something for your mind and something for your spirit. I highly recommend this program.

And as always, if you want to live a great life and achieve your goals, put all you have learned into action. Find out what daily morning routine works best for you and stick to it!

Thank you for reading this article.  If you enjoyed it and found it useful, then please share it with other people, or on social media.

Hope you are having a wonderful day!

Paul