Ep #19: The Power of Routines
episode summary
Routines get a bad rap because they're associated with boredom, but if you use them effectively, the results are anything but boring. I've got some great easy-to-implement routine ideas in this episode that just might transform your life.
Some routines (like my Fresh Start Morning Routine) help you be more intentional and present. Other routines (like planning meals) can free up your brain so you can do all sorts of awesome things that otherwise you might not have had the emotional bandwidth for.
Join me as we embrace routines!
Featured on the Show
The Miracle Morning, by Hal Elrod
The Miracle Morning™ Community
Fresh Start Morning Routine worksheet
Fresh Start Morning Routine video
Podcast Ep #10: From "Just Fine" to a Truly Fulfilling Life with Kari Kaiser
For the full show notes and transcript, head over here.
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CHAPTERS:
2:32 - Morning Routines
10:37 - Why Create a Routine?
15:05 - Use Your Brain Less
listen to the episode:
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Hey, I'm Michelle Gauthier and you're listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. Hello friends, thanks for joining me today. Today we're going to be talking about routines. Maybe that sounds kind of boring, like routines are boring, but I promise you they can make your life feel so much less stressful and so much less overwhelming. I'll cover what they are, how they make your life easier, and I'll share some ideas that you might not have thought of for where you can create routines in your life. But first I'd like to thank you for continuing to share this podcast with your circle, your friends, your family, your people. Right now, this podcast is in the top 3% of the 3,159,698 podcasts globally. That's a real number 3 million ballpark podcasts. Who knew there were so many podcasts? I did not. Anyway, thank you so much. That top 3% ranking is a popularity score which is based on the number of people who listen, the number of people who review ratings, getting new listeners, all those things. And when it's ranked highly like this, more overwhelmed working women see it on their list of suggested podcasts. So it's a huge win. Thank you so much to everyone who has listened, has shared and has done a review for it. If you haven't and you would. That would be amazing. This week's review comes from Alyssa812. Alyssa says, "Michelle is kind and smart and a pleasure to listen to. Best of all, she offers simple, practical strategies to make life more calm and manageable. I can apply the tools she shares to create a life more in sync with who I want to be for myself and the world. Thank you, alyssa. That review made me so happy because that is exactly. My goal is to give you practical, easy tools that you can use to improve your life right now. And if you are looking to improve your life in more ways than listening to this podcast, reach out to me. There is a link in the show notes if you're interested in one-on-one coaching with me. I basically take everything I teach you in this podcast and more, and work with you every week just you and me for six months until you have completely transformed your life. It's a lot of fun. I have great results, as you may have heard from last week's podcast. My clients get amazing results and I would love to chat with you. Okay, but back to our topic of the day. Let's talk about routines. The first thing I want to talk about is having a morning routine. I am such a believer in the idea that a morning routine can really change your whole day and that by taking time to intentionally - anytime you're doing something intentionally, I just think it's so powerful - to intentionally set yourself up for success for the day, and by set yourself up for success, that can really be anything that you want to do in the morning, that you're doing on purpose to make your day better. But I have a couple suggestions and things that I have tried in the past and that have worked for me, and things that I am doing today. First of all, I've talked about this on the podcast. I've written articles on this before, but if you are waking up in the morning and immediately just starting to scroll on your phone which in my case this could be the case for you too. In my case, my alarm is on my phone, so I have my phone in my hand when I wake up and it's so easy to click on Facebook or email or anything else. But if you can resist doing that, there are studies that show that that is not good for your brain and that, instead of having a gentle wake up where you're choosing what to put into your brain when you start looking immediately at your work emails or Instagram or Facebook, your brain gets immediately into that 'the- day- has- started', anxiety type of mode and it really there's nothing that shows that it does you any good to do that. So if you are doing that - and I have done that and I even do it sometimes still and then I think why did I just do that? Now I feel yucky. I don't want to start my day like that. I challenge you to consider a new morning routine. There are a couple different things that I would suggest. First of all, if you are a person who likes to work out in the morning and you have a morning routine of doing that, that can be a wonderful morning routine to just get up and get started by throwing on your workout clothes and heading out the door to the gym or to your basement, to your Peloton or whatever it is that you do for your routine. So I think that is a wonderful one. If you are a person who wants to, even if you work out maybe you just don't like to do it in the morning or if you'd rather have more quiet solitude and work on your mindset first thing in the morning, I've got a couple great options for you. One that I used to do all the time is called the Miracle Morning. It's based on a book by the author Hal Elrod, and I'll link that in the show notes. There's also a Miracle Morning community that you can join on Facebook and get ideas and encouragement from other people. The general gist of this morning routine it's an hour long. If you're like, ugghhhhhhh, yes, it is an hour long, it's definitely a commitment to do this one. I did this very religiously when I was transitioning from being married to being divorced and from having a steady job to starting my own business, and my life felt very upside down and I was filled with anxiety and lots of worry, and so doing this full Miracle Morning really helped me set my day, and at the time I really needed that. So it contains six specific steps and you do each one for 10 minutes. So you do 10 minutes of silence, which is meditation, 10 minutes of affirmations, which I think are wonderful. You know how I feel about having good thoughts and saying them out loud. Visualization, so visualizing your day and your future. Exercise, so just moving your body for 10 minutes. Reading. You wouldn't believe how many books you can get through just reading 10 minutes a day and you read a self-improvement kind of book, and then writing so, journaling. So I feel like all of those is amazing. Any one of those would help your morning start, and it's really a wonderful program that you can read all about the people who have changed their lives from doing this Miracle Morning method. I think it's really great. If you're looking for something shorter than that, or the idea of starting with the Miracle Morning at an hour is way more than you are ready to commit to, you can also use the morning routine that I created. The reason why I created this is because I got to the point where I didn't want to spend an hour and I felt like I could do a shortened version for myself and just get my mindset going in the right direction but also get what I needed mentally, mindset-wise. I will link this in the show notes. It's free. It's a one-page worksheet that you can fill out in the morning. What I do is I keep it on my iPad and I just fill it. I have, like the iPad pen and so I just fill out a new one every day. You can print it out. You can even just use a plain piece of paper and just look at the questions that I have on the worksheet, however you want to do it, but just in general, what this one contains is first a checkbox to have a glass of water. There's something about having a glass of water and I also brush my teeth before that, but I'll leave that up to you. Something about having a glass of water that just really makes me feel healthy and like I'm starting the day in a good, fresh way. And then you write down your thoughts, including your worrisome thoughts, like I don't have enough time to get everything done today. I can't get all this done. I'm worried about X, y and Z, whatever you're worried about. So you write out all of your worrisome thoughts. It comes with a short video, so it's kind of like a mini class. I teach you how to do a body scan to just see anywhere you're holding stress in your body. I teach you how to do square breathing so that you can start to relax in your body. And then we switch over and you write a couple things you're grateful for, one thing you love about yourself today - this one, when people first start doing it, they sort of hate this one, because that's not something that usually comes easy to us. But one thing I love about myself today, the thing I said about myself this morning, is I'm very consistent. I love that about myself. I know that I will stick with things. Yours might be something completely different. Yours might be that you're creative, or that you're a great friend, or that you love that you got up and did this morning routine for the first time, whatever it is, and then I ask you to come up with a mantra for the day. Something that I use often is "time is on my side, so I've got all the time in the world to get these things done. It just helps me to think that, instead of thinking the opposite of I'll never get all this done. And then this is my favorite part you visualize your day going well. So I just close my eyes and I take like one or two minutes and I think through everything I have to do that day and I think, if it all goes perfectly, what will it look like? And it's just refreshing to kind of pre-watch your day working out the way that you want it to work out. It's very powerful, and when you finish that, then you just go on with your morning. But you won't believe the difference that it makes to stop, investigate your mindset, set your thoughts where you want them to be, imagine your day going well and then starting your day versus jumping out of bed or not jumping out of bed, looking at your phone, hitting Facebook and Instagram and all those things. I don't find, and this might be different for you, and if you have a totally different take, then that's obviously okay, but I don't find that I benefit or feel good when I do that first thing in the morning. So that is my two cents, my very emphatic two cents, on why you should wake up in the morning and have a morning routine. If it's something that you've never done for yourself before, I challenge you just to try it for one week and see if it makes a difference. If you feel like it doesn't make a difference, great, throw it away, don't do it again. But I have a feeling that is going to make a huge difference for you in your life. So give it a try. The other thing about routines in general, and basically what a routine is, is it's just repeated behaviors that you do on purpose. So a habit is kind of like something that you get to do almost without thinking, like brushing your teeth or maybe if you make coffee first thing in the morning, it doesn't require a lot of thought, you just kind of do it. A routine is putting together behaviors that you do on purpose. Again, anytime you're doing something intentionally, it feels so much better. The reason why I love creating routines anywhere I can. First of all, I have a background. My 20 year career was in making things efficient and faster and more cost effective. So I have this mind that is always trying to make things most efficient. So routines are very efficient. They save time, they save effort, they save money in a lot of cases. But it also saves you having to make a million decisions in a day. I don't know if you've heard the term "decision fatigue", but I definitely feel that sometimes by the end of the day I just can't decide one more thing. So anywhere in my life that I can reduce the number of decisions that I need to make because I've already decided, it's a huge win for me in my brain. If you just think about an average day, think of a few places where you could possibly put in a routine and just reduce having to decide what you do in that moment. One of my clients, Kari, she's been on the podcast. She was a couple episodes ago. If you want to look up her episode, it's really good. But one of the things we talk about is she's self-employed and every day she would figure out what time she wanted to start working. So she likes to do other things in the morning and she liked to clean up her house a bit and she just every day would decide what time she wanted to go to work and she loved having the freedom of doing that. But when we really looked into it, she was wasting time deciding and thinking every day about what she wanted to do for that particular day. So we just decided she was going to start working at nine and it's a ballpark nine. She can get there a quarter till or a quarter after or whatever. There's no boss, there's nobody looking after what she's doing. But she decided to start work at nine and to do that morning routine that I just talked through with you for the first 10 minutes of her work day, and it made a tremendous difference just that she didn't have to decide that. It was already decided for her yes, by her, but for her. So think about your work schedule, or the time that you wake up in the morning or anything where you feel like you're having to decide every day, maybe even what you have for breakfast. Think about all the places where you're making decisions and replace it with a routine instead. For example, I love to eat the exact same thing every day for breakfast, and I think the reason why I love that is because it just takes the decision out of it. I will literally eat the same thing for like months in a row until I get to the point where I'm like I can't eat that for one more day, and then I have to switch to something else. I'm currently on Greek yogurt with toppings. So I, on Sundays, I prepare seven little jars and they have chia seeds and almonds and berries and all the stuff that I put on top of my Greek yogurt. And then when it's time for me to eat breakfast and I know exactly when that is, it's when I come home from the gym I eat breakfast. I just dump that on top of my Greek yogurt and mix it together, and there you go, and I also know how long that will keep me full and I know what I'm going to eat next. So next time I get hungry, I'm going to go to the fridge and I'm going to get my stuff and I'm going to make myself a protein shake. I know exactly what I put in that too. So I have a whole routine about how I eat. I also make all my lunches. I eat the same lunch for a week, not for months on end, but I eat the same lunch. I make those on Sunday too, or just prep the pieces of that on Sunday, and the thing that kind of kills me in the in a day as far as eating goes is dinner. Every day I'm figuring out what do we want to have for dinner, even if I've sort of prepared what we're going to have. You know I have the groceries or whatever. I re- figure it out every day. Sometimes we go out to eat. Sometimes we each make whatever we want and then we just sit together and eat it, and making that decision at the end of the day, it just doesn't feel good to me. I need to have a routine for that one. Tell me if you've got a good one. I'd love to adopt it for myself. What's your routine for getting dressed in the morning? Is that something that you have to put a lot of thought into? One of my clients was just telling me the other day that her closet has years and years worth of clothes, many of them that don't fit her anymore, and every time she walks into her closet she feels overwhelmed and has to look and choose from what fits and what she likes and what she doesn't like. And if you're doing that or trying things on, and then you realize you don't like it and taking it off and hanging it back up, that can be a unnecessarily difficult part of your morning. I've taken the time over the years to figure out what styles look good on me and what colors look good on me, and that's the only thing you're going to find in my closet. So when I go into my closet I'm not full-on capsule wardrobe, although I've done that before and I really liked it. If you don't know what that is, it's like you have a certain number of pieces. I think when I did it, my sister and I did this together, I think it was like 37. We each had 37 pieces and then a couple pairs of shoes. You just mix and match those. You know you love all of them and you mix and match them, so you don't have to think so much about what to wear. I don't count the items anymore, but I definitely don't have a lot in my closet and everything I have in my closet - like right now it's summer. I have eight or nine dresses hanging up in my closet that I love. I love the color, I like how they fit, and I can just pick any one of those any day and I know that I'll feel good in it. If I pick something out of my closet and I put it on and I don't like how it looks, I take it off, and I put it in my giveaway pile that moment, so I never have to have that moment again. So making a routine out of getting dressed can be very, very efficient. Also, I'm thinking of the people, celebrities - in fact, now of them thinking about it, I can't think of any women who do this. It's all men. Why are they owning this space? Maybe we need to try this. But, like, Mark Zuckerberg wears the same thing every day. Michael Kors has a uniform that he wears. Okay, no one else is coming to mind right now, but there are many male celebrities who wear like the same thing every day because and Mark Zuckerberg has been interviewed about this he says I make a million decisions in a day, and that's one I don't want to make. I don't decide what to eat and I don't decide what to wear. Exactly what I'm talking about. And look at him, you guys. He's a billionaire. Maybe that's all we need to do. Give some thought to the rest of your day, too. Are there things at work habits that you have that you're doing at work that aren't serving you, places where you're deciding every day you know, what time do I want to get to work, how many meetings am I going to take in a day? What hours do I work? If you're refiguring that out all the time, think about just creating a routine, creating some rules for that and following that. Think about your evening. If, right now, your evening is just you running around the house and picking it up and doing laundry and doing all those things, and then you kind of fall into bed at the end of the night, take a look at that and see if that's useful to you, or if you want to do one load of laundry every day and then get a glass of wine and sit on your couch and watch Netflix and then go to bed, or if you want to get in bed and read for the evening for 30 minutes. Just think about what would serve you, what helps you create this goal that we have - everybody who listens to this podcast has a goal of living a life that is less stressful, less overwhelming, more intentional, more calm. So, in summary, grab the morning routine that I offer for free. That's 10 minutes. If you want to go all in on a morning routine, then check out the Miracle Morning it's a great book and then look at the rest of your day and see where you can simplify and just create a routine where you don't have to do much thinking. Okay, that's it for today. I will see you next Monday. Have a great week. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegauthier.com. See you next week.
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