How to Start a Good Day – Tips and Tricks

Hey, this video is all about how to start a great day. For a lot of us, let’s face it, our days don’t always start that well. I think of the Beatles song where they say, “Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. You know, found my way downstairs, drank a cup, and look it up, I noticed I was late. I found my coat, I grabbed my hat, I made the bus in seconds flat.” This rushing to get started, our day with no modicum of self-care or setting up our day for success, and this video is going to give you a little insight into how I believe we can set ourselves up for success every single day.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Hey, I’m Paul Krismer, a happiness expert, and I base all the teaching that I do on good evidence from positive psychology research. Today, even this conversation that’s going to tell you a little bit about my day is going to at least begin with this little nugget from the research. That is that discipline is like a muscle, the more we use it, the more tired we become.

So typically, when we start our days, we have a fair bit of capacity to manage the day and our own behaviors the way we want to. As the day goes on, that capacity diminishes, which is why we eat laced potato chips and watch garbage TV at the end of the night because we have very little discipline at that point in the day. I often coach people when I’m teaching them about meditation or spiritual practice or any number of positive psychology interventions. When they say, “Well, when should I do this?” I very frequently say, “Well, do it first thing in your day.”

There are a number of reasons for that. One, this discipline idea that I just talked about, that we simply have less motivation to do what’s best for ourselves as the day goes on. But more than that too, for a lot of us, the only time we can carve out of the day that we can completely make it as our own is first thing in the morning. If you’ve got kids, once they get up, the day is theirs. Then you rush to get them to wherever you need to get them, or you then rush to get to work, and you do all the things that we have to do for other people as the day progresses.

If we can carve time out first thing in the morning, perhaps waking up before everybody else in the household, we can get the time that’s ‘me time’. That’s ideal because then we can build the day and the life that we want in those precious moments that we give to ourselves. The way I start my day, typically, I’m waking up well before 6:30 a.m. I don’t set an alarm unless I have an early morning flight to catch. I just wake up, linger in bed for a little bit, and then I immediately go to my gratitude practice, even before I get out of bed.

I just write down three things every day that have gone well from the past 24 hours. That’s training my brain to look for good stuff in my life, and it just makes me a happier person. The research is really, really good on that one. Then I go straight to meditation. I sit on a cushion for about 20 minutes and get very mindful, get very focused on this present moment. I’m training my brain to be more emotionally content, more emotionally regulated, and turning off that default mode network that’s constantly telling, narrating the story of my life. I become more silent and simply observe what’s really going on, getting real with what’s real. That’s why I meditate, and I do it next in the day.

Then I have a prayer practice. You could call it a ‘setting intention’ practice because I don’t have a particular religious belief or a deity that I worship. I’ve got a Christian upbringing, and I’ve kind of a lot of Buddhist philosophy since I’ve learned a lot about meditation. I don’t consider myself an adherent of any particular religion. Nevertheless, I have a kind of spiritual setting intentions practice. Reasonably, it could be referenced as prayer.

I simply have a reflective time about who I want to be, what it is I want to contribute to the world, and what kind of things I’m drawing into my life, calling from the universe to contribute to my own success. Then, of course, I also do well wishing for other people in my life. Sometimes it’s for the audiences that I’m speaking to. I spend a little time thinking about what I want to be able to relate to them that can be of service to them in their lives. Lastly, first thing in the morning, I’ve just done this practice more recently, I’ve been journaling. I set a timer for about 15 minutes, and I simply reflect on what’s going on in my life and where I want it to go.

There’s often tactical action planning that goes on in that time. It’s not something I’ve been very good at in the past, journaling, but I’m working on it right now. So, there’s my morning. I set it up for success every day before I have to engage in any other thing. One little additional note that I’ll make is that since I work from home, and these days with COVID, I haven’t been traveling to work very much at all. So, I’m working from home.

Most days, I can break away from my work at around 11 a.m. and do some physical exercise. Right now, it’s a gorgeous day outside. The sun is shining. It may just be a vigorous walk, but sometimes it’s lifting weights or doing some yoga. I bike ride, whatever it is. But at 11 o’clock, I get a break, get some big physical exercise, which boosts the neurotropic brain derived factor in my body so that I’m actually thinking better, and my brain is healthier. When I get back from the exercise, I have a clear, strong, motivated few hours in the early afternoon that I can get more stuff done. By late afternoon, I’m toast, and I do try to do stuff that’s not very important and maybe a bit administrative in nature. But that’s my basic structure to a good day, and I recommend it to you, or at least for you to consider it for your own benefit.

If this kind of stuff is helpful to you, click the like button, subscribe to my channel, you get a new video every Sunday morning. Thanks so much for watching, catch you next time.