These 3 Authors' Morning Habits Will Change Your Life | Vishen Lakhiani | John Butcher | Jim Kwik

One of our goals here at mindvalley is to help you develop systems that will allow you to create the best version of yourself. Many of us struggle throughout our day. We find ourselves constantly reacting to the daily situations that inadvertently crop up. One of the secrets to taking control of your daily life is to develop certain specific routines or rituals. These rituals, when implemented on a daily basis, will have a profound impact on how you move throughout the day. And remember, perfect days lead to perfect weeks, perfect weeks lead to perfect months. Perfect months lead to a perfect year. And perfect years lead to an extraordinary life. So first, let's talk about your daily set points. Here's what a set point is. You need to start every day by touching base with your body so you know the status of how things stand. I do this by checking my weight and body fat percentage. The first thing every morning. I check these against what I call my set points. Now, what's a set point? It's the point I have determined I won't allow myself to cross in my weight and body fat percentage. Think of it as a line drawn in the sand. That's that I am determined to never step across. If I find I've crossed my set point for weight or body fat, I make sure I work out regularly and I eat right for a couple of days to move back down to my established set point. So many of us see these things slip as we age. But when you set set points, you stay young and in control of your body. Now, the next ritual is optimized meditation. A lot of people misunderstand meditation. It's not just about clearing your mind. I think of meditation as a transcendent practice. And modern science shows that there's an exponential curve in terms of studies on how meditation improves just about every aspect of your life. So if you want to be successful, you need to meditate. Now, this is how I do it. I devised a meditation protocol called the Six Phase Meditation. It takes just 15 to 20 minutes. And now I go into the exercise routine or the workout. This takes about 20 minutes and it only has to be done at minimum twice a week. The optimized workout I do is designed based on the science of super slow strength training. It's designed to be an extremely short workout, no more than 20 minutes. It's an optimized program designed for rapid muscle building. Keeping solid musculature throughout your adult years has been scientifically proven to be tied to longevity and health. It is one of the most important things you can do to live long, look good, and feel your Best. Then we come to the optimized breakfast. Now, I know what you're thinking. Who wants to optimize breakfast? It's one of the most enjoyable parts of your day. But that's true. But remember, we eat for two reasons. We eat for ritual or we eat for fuel. If you want to eat for ritual, to have a beautiful breakfast with your family, go ahead. But often after I've dropped my kids off at school, I'm eating simply for fuel. So what I've designed is an optimized breakfast based on a nutrition stack. I start with a base, which is essentially protein. Now, when you're doing super slow strength training, you need protein in your body. So I start with that protein base. And in this shake, I also add various superfoods, from wheatgrass to spirulina. I might add blueberries or banana or peanut butter. All healthy nutrients. But here's the funny thing. I never make the shake the same way every day. It's not about eating the same thing every day. The human body is designed to grab what it needs from a wide variety of different foods. And by creating that variety, it never gets boring. So this is what I fuel myself with every single morning. Now, the final ritual is dedicated learning time. The last of the five key rituals is about going deep into your continuous learning. This is vital to my day, and I intently focus on Learning for about 20 minutes every day before I start work. Robin Sharma, whose Hero, Genius, Legend quest is coming up at mindvalley, says that most people live a life on default, when instead we should live a life like warriors. What he means is that we have to dedicate time to our own growth. And so I might sit in front of the TV in the morning before going to work with my shake and watch an episode of my daily MindValley Quest learning module. Now, as I'm commuting to work, I might open up my podcast app and continue learning. We have a mindvalley podcast that you can listen to completely for free on itunes or Spotify or any other podcast service. And we release new episodes two to three times a week. And I try to bring in some of the world's leading thinkers in unique areas of personal growth. These key rituals, when applied to your daily life, can help you find the energy and focus needed to create the best version of yourself possible. Join me in making these simple rituals a part of your daily life. I promise you the results will be astonishing.

Hello, Mindvalley Community. My name is Jim Kwik with Kwik Learning, and I'm here, as always, to help you to learn quickly. One of the questions in the community that we get is, Jim, what do you do every single morning to jumpstart your brain for greater success, greater levels of focus, greater levels of productivity? So I'm going to walk you through my morning routine. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is I have a process to remember my dreams. Now you're like, Jim, why do you want to remember your dreams? The reason why is often as you spend your day learning and working to solve problems. Solve problems in your work, in your life, and everything else. When you sleep, your mind doesn't stop. Your unconscious mind is still working on those problems, and you come up with incredible insights and solution. The challenges is in the morning, most people don't remember their dreams. So we teach a process on how to do that. The second thing I do after I wake up is I get out of bed and I make my bed. You're like, Jim, why is that good for your brain? Two reasons. Number one, clean environment is important for you. Like, you know, when you clean off your desktop, you clean up your office, your bedroom, you have a clearer mind. The second reason why is I want to start my day with success. Because how you do anything is how you do everything. So you start with excellence. Take two minutes, make your bed, and it's really great because it's when you come home at the end of the day, you come back full circle, back to success. The third thing I do is I drink a lot of water. Your brain is mostly water, 80% water, and a lot of people dehydrated. You use so much water and it's so important for your brain to be hydrated. The challenge is you lose a lot of water when you're sleeping. So I super hydrate first thing in the morning. Then what do I do? I brush my teeth. You're like, jim, why do you brush your teeth? How's that good for your brain? What you do is you brush your teeth with your opposite hand. It's been shown that by using your opposite hand to eat or to brush your teeth, as your body moves, your brain grooves. As you brush your teeth with your opposite hand, it actually creates more neural connections inside your brain. So the next thing I do is I do a deep breathing exercise. The other thing besides hydration that's good for your brain is oxygen. A lot of people get tired and they have brain fog and what do they do with their mental fatigue? And I would say the number one thing is get oxygen in your body. And here's the thing. Your brain is only 2% of your body weight on average, but it consumes 20% of the nutrients and the oxygen. So it's so important to do deep breathing exercises. We talk about that in our programs also as well. What's the next thing I do in my morning routine? I make myself some tea. I make what I call a brain tea. It has gotu kola, ginkgo biloba, it has lion's mane. It has some essential fatty acids that are there really good ingredients that boost my focus and my memory. Now as I'm drinking the tea, what am I doing? I'm actually journaling. Because if you want to boost your brain power, it's important to take notes. And I do a whole process where I teach you the best ways of taking notes and making notes to be able to plan out your day and also to be able to write the things that you're most grateful for. So I go through this gratitude process in my journal because I feel like your brain really throws thrives on gratitude because if you can't appreciate the things that you already have, you're not going to be given the things that you really want. So why do I focus on gratitude first thing in the morning? Well, I have my vision board and then my goals, everything that I want. But I also have a gratitude board, the things that I'm most grateful for in my life. And if you want to feel instant gratitude, just count all the things in your life that you have that money can't buy. After that, I'm drinking my tea, I'm writing in my journal because a lot of geniuses write in journals, right? Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein, Marie Curie, all these journals and they want to do these studies say, are geniuses writing in journals because they're geniuses or is it the opposite? It's because they're writing in journals that they become these incredible geniuses of their field. When I'm done drinking my brain tea and writing my journal, the next thing I do is I do some just morning exercises. This is not my exercises for the day, but three or four minutes of high intensity workout to kind of get your heart back. Heartbeat going. Because here's the thing, whatever is good for your heart, usually good for your head. Because when I'm getting my heartbeat going, what's happening is I'm getting more blood flow to my brain and more oxygen and that's very, very important. So what do I do next? I make my brain power smoothie. And you're like, jim, what's a Brain power smoothie. There are certain foods that are really great for your brain. And I teach people how to memorize these foods. And what we do is I just put them all in a blender. So certain foods like, like blueberries, right. I call them brain berries. They're things like avocado. Very good for the brain also as well, obviously, hydration. We're going to talk about all those ingredients in another video. So as I'm drinking my brain power smoothie, what am I doing? I'm reading, right? 20, 30 minutes a day of dedicated reading. Because leaders are readers. You're like, Jim, I can't read a book a week because the average person reads only about one or two books a year. But the CEO reads about four to six books, books a month. Right. So you want to get to about a book a week. So remember, first you make your habits, and then your habits make you design the first hour a day to be brain friendly and you'll win the rest of the day.

So in this video, we would like to share some of our favorite habits that have really helped us create the extraordinary life that we have.

And these are simple daily habits that we have done every day for years in a row that add up to the life that we've envisioned.

Exactly. So the first group of habits is in our health and fitness. Because health and fitness is such a foundational category of life. If you've got your health and fitness firing on all cylinders, you're going to have energy to bring to your career. You're going to have a better love life, you're going to feel better emotionally. This is a super important category. And we've got two great habits that we've created over the years. The first one is easy and it's simple and everybody knows it. We exercise every day.

It's body movement.

Exactly.

It's just being conscious of your body, getting into your body, moving your body. You can do it a million different ways. Just get into your body.

Whatever works for you.

Yeah.

So we've done that every, every day, just about for the last 30 years. Doesn't have to be an hour. Doesn't even have to be a half hour. Even, even 10 minutes. Just becoming conscious of your body and making sure that you're exercising it and using it. Habit number one.

Number two is our green smoothies. We have green smoothies, little glass of green smoothie, probably two times a day. And it's a really simple recipe. You can do it in your Vitamix or your Ninja, and it's Avocado, cucumber, any kind of leafy greens.

You can put a carrot, celery, carrot.

Celery, all the vegetables that you love. And if you like a little sweet, add some mango or carrot.

It's like having a liquid salad. And you slam a couple of those during the day. You've got your nutrition handled for that day. Pretty much everything is.

They make you feel great.

They really do. You can feel them in your body. Unlike a lot of supplements that you take. You can't even feel what it's doing to you, man. You can feel those green smoothies. You get an immediate energy jolt. Okay, next is our love strategies. So we got a couple really good ones. Our love relationship strategies center around connection rituals. And we have a number of different ones. We're going to talk about two here. The first is our daily connection ritual. So every day after work, Ms. And I take a walk in our garden for as long as we can. Half hour, at least an hour. And we just catch up from the day she downloads what happened, the challenges and opportunities of the day. I do the same thing. We really get a chance to connect that way.

And if we do that daily, then our dates tend to be about love and not about work or the daily activities that we're doing every day.

And that's our second strategy, is our weekly overnight date night, which we've done every week for the last 25 years, missing very, very few. No matter where in the world we are, we handle childcare with the kids and we have grown up time just to ourselves overnight once a week.

It's amazing. And if you're not doing that already, we highly recommend you do that immediately if you're in a relationship.

Relationship.

It's our number one, literally number one love relationship.

It just keeps you connected. It keeps you connected. It keeps you in that flow of.

Love, love and passion and romance. It keeps the romance alive in your relationship for sure. So those are our two favorite love habits. Next would be just sort of our internal world.

So one of the most important things that I do every morning is I have my morning habit, which is to get in a state of gratitude, of presence, embody myself, get back in my body from the night's sleep. And I do that with really getting mindful and just being really grateful. And I usually take a walk outside with our dog, get in nature. That's a wonderful way to do it. Just instantly connect and just really think about all the things I'm grateful for.

She lights candles and incense and makes a little ritual out of it. And I'll tell you, the days that Missy does that you can like, the whole house has this.

Absolutely. It's the time that I really do get centered in myself so that I from that place, I can handle anything, Anything.

And our whole family centered when she's centered.

That's true.

So my rituals and habits around sort of internal centering myself, getting my head right, getting my emotions right. First of all, I take a nap every day. And I've actually read that there are a lot of famous people in history that have been nappers. The hours of noon till 3 are pretty much blocked out. That's my siesta. I wake up early, so I put in 6, 7 hard hours of work. And then I'm off the grid. No phone calls, no emails.

Amazing.

And I just. That's my time. And then I pick up in the afternoon if I've got more work. That's been wonderful for me. Also, meditation. Interestingly enough, when we take a look at the habits that Lifebook members most say are the most important habits in their life, meditation shows up in more categories than any other habit. It's probably the highest leverage thing that you can do right for your health and fitness, for your mental and emotional state.

It's amazing because it gets you centered. It gets you in that place where you're centered, and you can move from that place of your truth. Another morning habit that I do is journaling. And this is great. First thing, when I wake up, if I have any dreams, I can write my dreams down. It also just empties me out to get me ready to be centered and ready for the new day. And I never used to really journal, but I have in the past few years and it has really been a profound experience for me because I've been able to empty my mind even more. If you have a hard time meditating, journaling. It was actually the doorway for me into meditation.

And so the last habit we'll share is a massive habit that I discovered probably four or five years ago. This is a career habit, and I call it my one thing. So when I wake up in the morning, I've discovered that my first two to three hours are by far my most effective. Thinking time, business time. I can write really, really well in the morning. I can't in the afternoon. I can work out in the afternoon, I can answer email in the afternoon, do a lot of like, production oriented stuff in the afternoon, but my creative time is in the morning. So about four years ago, I got into the habit of working on my single most important project for the first two to three hours of my morning. Every morning. No screwing around with the Internet, no checking emails, no checking the text on my phone. I go straight to have my coffee, and my brain gets right, and I pour all that creative energy into my most important thing. Game changer, right?

Amazing. And again, you just touched on something very important, and that is learning your own natural rhythm. Like, John is a really creative person. In the morning, I'm not so much. I'd rather move my body, maybe get, you know, in gratitude. So really learn your own rhythms is a good thing.

Yeah, that's a. That's a very good piece of advice. Once you learn your rhythms. Like, I don't like working out in the morning. She loves working out in the morning.

Right?

Once you learn your rhythms, you can build your habits around that. And you guys, your habits will change your life. Your habits make your life. They make you who you are, and they create your life. That's exactly right.