How do you start your morning? Hitting snooze and openning facebook? Waking up late and rushing to work?If you really want to have positive change in your life, look at the simple things you do every dayand make one tiny change for the better every day.  One easy way to change how you live each day – how you think, how you react, how you show up – is to start a morning ritual.

Keep it short and simple so that you have no excuse to skip it.  Sit up in your bed and start your morning ritual with a mindfulness meditation exercise.  This clears the mind and the meditation is an effective way to practice concentration and focus.  This is followed by 10 deep breaths to train the body to breathe deeper for better oxygenation and stress management.  After, a visualization exercise to gain a clear vision, reset goals, and align your thought patterns.  The key to making lasting change is in the daily visualization activity.  The vision needs to be “your vision” for your future for a longer term, bigger combination of goals. 

My morning ritual is the following:

Just a few minutes before starting the day (maybe 10 minutes max), sit up in bed in a comfortable seated position:

1. Begin with meditation –

First focus on a spot across the room trying not to blink for as long as you can. Then, focus on a faint sound until you can hear nothing else, then focus on the heart beat until you can feel it. 

2. Ten deep belly breaths –  

Take 10 deep breaths.  Breathing into to the belly, holding the breath for a moment and slowly pushing out every bit of air with each exhalation.  Try to make each breath deeper than the one before it.

3. Visualization –

Close your eyes and see yourself as you are in 1 to 5 years from now.  Picture your life exactly as it would be if everything you wanted worked out.  See every aspect of your life including work, family, social connections and health.  Make the vision as “real” as possible.  

This is the key to changing your beliefs in yourself, your limitations you place on yourself and the decisions you make each day.  It is a way to introduce the idea to your subconscious mind that all of this is possible. The first step is to believe it is possible so that you can begin to create the steps required to make it happen. The next step is to see and feel it “as if it has already happened”.  You will begin to carry yourself in a newway and make decisions which are more in alignment with your goals.  Finally, practice, practice, practice.  

You can spend as little as 5 minutes doing it but you want to work up to doing for 20-30 minutes in the morning eventually.

The morning ritual is not meant to be a short term practice.  It is a lifetime ritual that you continue to improve with continued practice.  Start your day with your vision!

Try this technique for 5 days and let me know how it makes you feel in the comments below.