How to Stick With a New Morning Routine

With your new morning game plan figured out, it’s time not only to put it into action, but make it your new morning routine.

Why is this important? Because you want to make sure your new plan happens every morning without fail and turning into a habit is the best way to make sure that happens.

Is willpower necessary?

Before something becomes a habit or a routine, it seems to take a lot of willpower to make things happen. That fight over willpower is energy that you will need for other things throughout your morning and busy rest of the day.

There is a debate over willpower vs discipline, but these two things are not really opposites. Yes, it will take some willpower, mental strength, and drive at first to create the new morning habits, but once they are set, it will become automatic like brushing your teeth before bed.

But what if you can’t start the habit forming steps that lead to routine and make willpower less necessary?

Reconnecting with your Why

That may be when you need to reconnect with why you are forming your new goals. If you are trying to do things out of a sense of external obligation rather than internal drive, you will never make changes.

Any change in your life has to be connected with a strong sense of why — what you expect to gain from the new change. Why that is important, the consequences of not making the change and a clear assessment of why you want to make the change vs the fear or internal objection that’s stopping you.

Sometimes, you have to confront those negative feelings that well up when it comes time to do your new morning changes (that little devil on your shoulder so to speak that keeps you stuck in place).

I’m talking about the feeling of reisstance that keeps you hitting the snooze button, even though you’ve now gone through all the trouble of identifying your new routines, prioritizing them, and eliminating unimportant activities that clutter your morning, and figuring out a strategy and order to do things in (e.g. devoting the first hour of yoru day to business, going for a run before breakfast, drinking water and stretching as soon as you get up, writing emails to your list, and so on).

After all that planning, you may still face resistance.

Willpower is not forcing yoruself to do it in the face of the resistance (won’t work). It’s figuring out the resistance and finding your true driving motivation to do the new thing.

The other thing to pay attention to is if you discover there is no real internal drive to make the change, you may need to drop the new habit and focus on what you really want.

Be real with yourself!

The surefire way to form new habits

Once you come up with an excellent working morning routine, stick to it for a few weeks.

That’s the best way to turn it into a healthy habit. Before long, it will feel like the new normal and you no longer have to remind yourself to do each thing along the way.

It will have become a habit and a routine you’ll follow automatically. It will take a lot less effort and mental pep-talk to get things done…even if your new method includes a 30-minute run, or getting up at the crack of down to work on your most crucial business task for an hour.

What to do when your new plans fall apart

Watch out for moments when you slip back into your old habits and routines.

It’s going to happen.

The key is to catch it early and get back on track as quickly as possible. For example, let’s say you’ve been doing well with waking up 30 minutes earlier and going for a run before you start your day. Then one day you oversleep and can’t make it out there. Or the weather turns too bad, you get sick or hurt, or something else pops up that keeps you from going on that run. That’s life. It happens.

What’s important is what you decide to do the next morning.

Your most important job

Your most important job whenever life gets in the way of your new morning routine is to get back on track as quickly as possible. Do what you can as soon as you notice the disruption. For example:

• If the weather is bad, do a quick workout at home, or head to the gym to run on the treadmill.
• If you overslept, try to squeeze in a few minutes of meditation or doing something to grow your business before you get back to the rest of your day.
• Most importantly, get back on track with your regular morning routine as soon as possible. Get back into your new habits the next morning if at all possible.

Don’t dwell on what you didn’t do. Look forward and focus on what you can do. You can always restart at any moment.

Actively remind yourself to get back on track for a few days until it routine is firmly again in place. You’ll be glad you did when you start to see the results you’ve been hoping for.

Be sure to sign up for our free 7-day Morning Makeover challenge to get daily action steps delivered right to your email and a success toolkit that will help you make those vital changes in your morning and your life.

Originally posted 2018-01-12 05:44:00.