We Must Master Our Mornings To Achieve High Success in Our Real Estate Business

Welcome back, Business Freedom podcast listeners. Another awesome episode still in this productivity stretch of the podcast here. And today I want to talk about why we must master our mornings. This is kind of like, I can't imagine anyone listening to the podcast has not heard the power of intentionality around a morning ritual. And I challenge you to look back over the last 30 days and, you know, if we know it's good for us and myself included, if we know it's good for us, why don't we do it more often and challenge yourself. So look back 30 days. How many of the last 30 days, you know, did you at least spend 30 minutes with like, just, just really clear intentionality around how you want your morning routine to go to flow? Did you get up before the kids? Did you do your Bible study, your meditation? Did you move your body? Did you do some sort of gratitude practice? I use the five minute journal. So I want to talk about why we don't do it, why we don't do things that are good for us more often. And. And then I want to just kind of COVID my perfect morning routine. And it's not perfect all the time, but what a perfect morning routine looks like. So here is my just knowing myself, and I think I fall into the category of a pretty stereotypical real estate, team leader, business owner, entrepreneur, whatever you want to call us, we do these grand gestures. So a good example of a grand gesture for me is back in 2015, I think early 2015, I decided I want to get back in really good shape, like athletic shape, and really tune my physical body. And so what do I do? I sign up for a marathon. I'm not a runner at this point at all. And I took two and a half years off after this marathon from running, and I signed up for a marathon. And while I'm training for the marathon, I'm like, oh, man, let me even. I haven't even run a single marathon yet. I decide that I want to do the Great Wall of China marathon. It's at like, it's at a high altitude. It's, you know, if you're in extremely awesome physical condition, you can do in like five hours. It's. It's just intense and crazy. And so that's what we do. We, instead of just going for a walk three times a week for 30 minutes, we, as entrepreneurs, business owners, real estate team leaders, we're hard chargers. We're going to sign up for the grand gesture and then it's not realistic. Life happens and we get off track. And so in my Morning routine or in your morning routine, are you biting off more than you can chew? Maybe 15 minutes is where you need to start. 15 minutes, five days a week. I like doing it just five days a week. I like sleeping in a little bit later on Saturday and Sunday. I like having that cadence of Monday through Friday where I can get up a little bit before Julie Anderson Kendall, my wife and my children. And I can kind of just get in a good space. And so there are four elements and I use this app called Streaks, which there's four elements in my perfect morning routine that I would do five days a week. And for me it's not perfect. I go through three or four weeks where I'm not traveling and everything's consistent. I'm in my home, Julie's not traveling, Everything is sort of like steady state. And then we just came off an intensive workshop which twice a year for our members we have a two day workshop where I did, I was actually attended event before that event in Nashville. So I was gone for seven nights. I slept in a hotel for seven nights and that screwed everything up. I didn't do any morning routine. I only worked out once in seven days. I didn't hydrate properly. Like all of my habits that I've stacked and I've successfully built over the last however many years kind of fell off the rails the last seven days. I'm talking you're home, you're in the zone, you're in a normal routine. What does your morning routine look like and why do a morning routine for me, so I'll just talk personally and this is the same anyone you hear talk about a morning routine. For me, it gives me clarity, it gives me focus on what's important and it gives me sort of a grounding. The fact that there is way more to this life than the things that we worry about and we fret over our businesses. Typically if you're a real estate team leader, you're still in production or you're a top producing agent and you're heavy in production, whatever. Wherever you are in your real estate growth journey, chances are if you're involved in real estate, it's a pretty stressful all consuming. Like you get up in the morning. If you don't have intention around not turning your phone on and getting into some solitude, into a daily practice. You're going to get up and run, check your phone, there's deals blowing up, you're just out of sorts all the time. And so in a perfect morning routine, you'll get up a little Bit ahead of everybody. I did one of my grand gestures with a morning routine and I made this big actually, I'm gonna physically get it here. For those of you that are watching, all right, bear with me. I know if you're watching the audio, you're like, what is he doing? If you're watching the video, I made this, I saved it too. So you can see on the video, I was going to establish a habit, a grand gesture habit of 66 days. So that's London School of Economics did a study that it takes actually 66 days to establish a habit. Not 21 days, not 30 days. I know, I just gave you a 30 days challenge around your morning routine. The challenge I took was to wake up at 5am for 66 days in a row. And I was around a group of entrepreneurs, hard chargers, grand gesture type people. And a lot of these types of challenges were being thrown around the room. You know, I'm a train for a marathon. I'm going to run every day for, you know, just these things that are unsustainable. So that was a grand gesture that I did not follow through on. I do not believe that the 5am club is for everybody. I like getting up at 6am I typically am physically like eyes shut in sleep mode at between, between 10 and 10:15. So for me, seven and a half to eight hours sleep is like the ideal amount of sleep. And so 10 to 6am you know, 6am Kids are getting up about 6:45. So I have about 30 to 45 minutes where I can do the things I want to do. And so I've just, I figured out the cadence in my home. It works really, really well. So the things I focus on are I get into the Bible right away. Right now I'm studying the book of Luke. My church is doing acts and I'm going to be doing that study here shortly. I meditate with the Abide app. So I go in from the Bible, do 10 or 15 minutes there. Then I'll do a 10 minute meditation on the Abide app, which is really, really awesome. And then I'll do my five minute journal. And those three apps are right next to each other. You can see the Streaks app, Bible Abide and five minute journal. And then the kids will be getting up and I'll sort of help get them settled. And then I really will look to get a workout in before, you know. So 6 to 8am is kind of when everything happens. I love to get a 30 to 45 minute workout in in the morning. It doesn't always happen. If it slips, I time block it for the afternoon. So that really is. I get some. I hydrate. I make this amazing coffee which is a bulletproof K cup coffee with some protein powder and some almond butter. It is unbelievably awesome. I've got this gallon jug here with thyme on it. It is a Quifit Q U, I F, I T and oh, build life. So this kind of tracks my water throughout the day. But that's all I really look to have happen in the morning is I want to get in the Bible, I want to do a meditation and I want to have a practice of gratitude. And my practice of gratitude, if you don't have the five minute journal, it's pretty basic. It is. You're asking yourself some questions. So this is in the morning. You do it twice a day and you don't need this app to do it. Although it's a pretty simple app. I think it's like 99 cents or 5 bucks or something. Totally worth it. And you attach an image to it. I'm grateful. I am grateful for three things. One, two, three. What will I do to make today great? One, two, three and a daily affirmation. I am blank. That's the morning. And then in the evening it's three amazing things that happened today. 1, 2, 3. How could I have made today even better? So you can journal those every day. It's not overly complicated to do that. That really does give you this psychology of contentment. You know, you're always sort of just appreciating what's really great about your life, about your business, about your family. And with if you're filling your mind with thoughts of gratitude and it's really tough to get overly down about any circumstance in your life. So that's basically it. We keep it simple. Decide what are the two or three things you're going to do. Start out at 15 minutes and then work to expand it from 15 to 20 to 25 to 30. A 30 minute time block ultimately is what you want to build to don't really do more than two or three things and just get into the practice of a morning routine. Not a grand gesture. If you wake up at 7am now, don't decide you are going to join the 5am Club. That is a grand gesture. That is not sustainable. The intention here is to build a practice of five days a week of a morning routine that you are going to be drawn to because it starts your day with just a clarity of focus and an internal power that you know, no matter what happens during the day, that you've got this. That you've got this, even if there's not a faith component to it, I trust that you'll do something to connect to something bigger than you that will give you strength to power through whatever comes your way that day. One thing I'll add here is that I take a little bit of extra time on Monday morning and I do a weekly startup and I highly recommend doing a weekly startup. This is just a little bit of time where you're doing the things that have to happen on a weekly basis. In my weekly startup, it is 8:30 to 10am so it's kind of after the kids are off to school. It's an extension. It's just a weekly practice that I do well. I water my plants in my office. That's a reminder. I have this on the calendar. I do my weekly prep where I choose my top three things I'm going to accomplish this week. I do my Monday daily prep, the daily big three that I look to accomplish in that day. We have a weekly team feedback form. Internal team members give feedback about their last week. I review that. I review all of our weekly scorecards, you know, sales, marketing and our team scorecard. And then I add issues to the different meetings I have on Mondays. Monday is my team meeting day. And so that's just one other thing. And the reason I even mentioned that, not to complicate this episode, it's just all of these things are time blocked in my calendar. And so I just have these recurring appointments where 6am to 7am is Bible study meditation, 7am to 8am is family time and get ready. Then I have 8 to 8:30 is buffer time. That's when the kids are getting off and I'm getting ready and then my day starts from there. And so without a calendar time blocking system, which I'm covering in the next episode, you're dead in your tracks. You will never get any consistency or life if you don't master your calendar. So we'll talk about that in the next episode. If you're at a point in your business journey where something in our conversation through this podcast is connecting with you on a deeper level, I definitely want to have a conversation with you. As of this recording, I am still doing strategy sessions. 45 minute conversation with you about your business. What's working, what's not working, where you want to go, what's holding you back, what might have got you off track in the past, we work with small teams, medium teams. Big teams. Basically, if you have achieved about a 500,000 GCI level and you're already running a team no matter how small it is, all the way up to we have clients at the 5 million level. We help real estate team leaders build success. Sustainable, profitable, systems driven businesses that are worth owning that you love. If you've fallen out of love with your business, go to realestatebschool.com there's an obnoxious orange banner on the top to book in a strategy session with me and we'll go through your business and we'll figure out a plan to move you forward so you can have time, money and stress in your favor. More time, more money, less stress is what we're after. We'll see you there. Be good.