5 Daily Rituals That Helped Me Supercharge My Productivity | Vishen Lakhiani

Robin Sharma said, genius is less about genetics and more about your core routines and rituals. But most people in the world today don't have any core routines that they put in place in the morning. The first 60 minutes of your day are essential. And if you put in place the right practices, the right habits, the right rituals, you set yourself up for an incredible day and to do really epic things in life. So since a lot of people ask, this is what I've discovered to be the optimal habits and practices that can be done in the morning. And these are what I do to set yourself up for an incredible day and life. The first is getting your daily stats. Now, what I mean by this is I have a scale in my bathroom that tells me my weight and my body fat percentage. I'm currently on a workout challenge to reduce my body fat percentage and get ripped in my mid-40s. There are many different types of scales you can use. These are becoming very popular right now. I like the ones that connect to your phone, actually give you a chart that shows how your weight and body fat percentage fluctuate over time. Here's why it's useful. In my book, the Code of the Extraordinary Mind, I talk about this idea called set points. All of us must establish a set point that is a non negotiable point which we're not allowed to cross. And when it comes to weight, we gotta have set points. When it comes to body fat percentage, we gotta have set points. And if I ever go beyond that, which recently happened after Christmas, I work out, I eat well for the next two weeks so I can go back below my non negotiable set point. Now the next thing I do is meditation. Meditation is so important. So here's what I did. I stacked together six different forms of meditation. Each takes between a minute to three minutes. So all in all, it goes on for around 15 to 20 minutes. Now, the first phase is called compassion. I do a simple compassion ritual and this comes from Z Zen Buddhism. And it's about opening up your levels of kindness to all other human beings. Because I believe this is so important for all of us to be kind as we go through our day. The second is gratitude. Scientists have shown that gratitude has the single highest correlation to well being than any other human characteristic. The third is forgiveness. And what I practice over here is a simple forgiveness exercise on myself, on other people, which means that I go through my day with no grudges. It is crazy the research coming out right now that shows what forgiveness does to well being. Now at this point I go to phase four. Now, the first three phases are about dealing with presence with your present state. When I go to phase four, it's about your future. See, I believe that we live our best lives when we are grounded in the present, but still have a vision for our future. So phase four is creative visualization. And here I visualize my goals. Then I go on to phase five. Now, phase five is called the Perfect Day. Here I set an intention for how I want every aspect of today to unfold. I'm going to drive to work and I'm going to listen to this amazing podcast. My early morning meeting is going to go well. That then I come to phase six. And phase six, I guess, is the only phase that has not yet been proven by science. But it's something that billions of people around the world deeply care about. That sixth phase is simply prayer. You say a simple prayer of gratitude or you ask for a blessing from whatever higher power you believe in. This is where I found that many people feel safe and secure when they feel that they are part of something greater. That's phase six. That's the fastest phase to do. I do it in a very unique way. I imagine God and I imagine myself giving a fist bump to God. Now I'm done. I'm done with my six phase meditation and I have put myself in a peak state to have an incredible day, but also an incredible life. Now if you want to practice the six phase meditation, we've made it really easy. I recorded a recording of it. It's on mindvalley's Omvana app and it's completely free. When you download the app, you get it free. Following meditation, I head to the gym. Now, the gym protocol that I use is a new protocol that's currently in R and D at minevalley. We've been testing it out now on over a hundred people. But it's based essentially on a very different way of working out in the gym. The total workout time is typically no more than 15 minutes. It's really, really, really short. It's an optimized workout, but it's designed for rapid muscle building. And the reason for that is that musculature has a massively high correlation with longevity and health. But most people work out wrong. They do these long one hour workouts which actually are highly sub optimal. What I do is something that at Mindvalley we call 10X. But it's based on a series of books that are showing how the new science of working out in the gym says that it's not about high reps, but, but it's about pushing things at 90% of your maximum rep. There's only five workouts. I do only five specific gym exercises. These, called the big five, are the five that you want to focus on because it gives you the most full body workout. And when you combine these five exercises with the slow approach, you get incredible muscle gain. We've been testing this out right now and in batch after batch after batch. Irregardless of people's age, what we are seeing is that in one month and a total of 117 minutes average workout time in one month, people see a strength increase of 25%. I do those five exercises in the gym using the slow approach. And this has given me the fastest growth in musculature and the best results compared to any other exercise program I've ever done before. Now, my gym workouts are not done blind. They there are specific targets I aim for. And this is also really important. A lot of people stop working out because they are doing it with no set goal. In my case, I have set specific goals. Now, one of those goals is a model for the male figure called the Adonis model. And now this doesn't apply to women. The workout protocols I'm talking about applies if you're a man or a woman. But this particular goal is unique to men. And so the secret to an effective workout is not just the style of workout, it's knowing the right exercise, it's knowing the right approach. In my case, the slow approach. But the third ingredient is you must have a specific goal that you're aiming for. So I now go into my learning time and for learning, obviously, I use mindvalley Quest, right? Because Quest was designed to help me support my own habit of doing 20 minutes of learning something every single day. So right now I'm on Jim Kwik's Super Brain Quest, which is a 30 day program that teaches you how to improve your memory, your learning ability and so on. And every day there is a five to 20 minute lesson. So this is what I do. If I'm in my car, I listen to it on my phone. If I'm at home, I simply open up the Quest app on my Apple tv, I sit back, relax, and I get myself a dose of Mindvalley Quest. So how Quest works is that every single day there is a lesson. And after 30 days, as you take these lessons, you level up into a whole new vision of yourself. So today what I'm doing is I'm learning to improve my memory with Jim Kwik by learning how to remember long strings of numbers, like 50 digit strings of numbers, backwards and forwards in a couple of minutes. It's a really interesting concept. So one of the reasons this habit is so important to me. Robin Sharma says that most people live life on default, but what he suggests is we gotta live life like a warrior. And this means dedicating but sometime to ourselves and our own growth. And this is so important to all of us who want to really play at a different level. So the final part of my daily ritual is basically sleep and reading. One of the key things I do every day is I set aside around 30 minutes a day to read. And I read from midnight to 12:30am What I'm reading right now is this book called Brick by Brick. It's this incredible story of the LEGO company. I'm a geek and my kids are geeks, so we love Lego. But what happens is, if you set aside half an hour every day to read a book, what you will start to notice, especially if you've studied speed reading programs like Superbrain by Jim Quick, you can read a book in about one week. In one week you're done. Three and a half hours is 30 minutes a day. Thirty minutes a day times seven is three and a half hours. And that's how long it can take you to read a book like that and really boost your level of knowledge. I then go to bed shop at 12:30 and I wake up at 7:30. I try to get seven hours of sleep if we cut back on sleep. And a lot of people do that because they're having a busy day and they wanna wake up maybe 30 minutes earlier just to get more done. It's a dumb and a dangerous idea. We need sleep. So I make sure I always get seven hours of sleep. So now that breakfast is done, I head off to work. And I like to remember this concept from Robin Sharma. He calls it Traffic University. And what he basically says is, look, your commute time to work is an incredible time to learn. So as soon as I get into my car to work, this is what I do next. I love listening to podcasts as I drive and I've been doing it for about two years now. And it's such a great way to learn so much in your commute. But I wanted to go a little bit further. I know a lot of you love our mindvalley videos and talks from a fest and the special guest I bring on. So we decided to start a mindvalley podcast. We as a company have this massive library of interesting talks and ideas and techniques from so many of the world's greatest teachers. But a lot of it is video based. And we thought, what if we could translate a lot of this into podcast format so that you guys can listen? So right now, I'm psyched to announce that the mindvalley Podcast has officially launched. We already have around something like eight to 10 episodes, and there are new episodes going up every week. All you have to do is go to your favorite podcast app and just search for the mindvalley podcast and subscribe. So you learn from a wide array of truly remarkable men and women all across the planet and in every aspect of human transformation. So welcome to mindvalley, and this is how I start my day. So if you guys like that, feel free to share your best practices for your morning ritual. I'd love to know what you guys are doing. Feel free to ask questions or add a comment. I'm happy to answer. And I hope this was of value to you. Remember, for all of us, our rituals are gonna be different based on what we wanna do in life. But the key thing to remember is this. As Robin Sharma says, it's not your genetics, it's your habits. It's your rituals. It's what you do in that morning for yourself. Before you give yourself up to your job or everything else you're doing in the world, focus on yourself first. And that's the recipe for really incredible life.