Ten Things I Do Every Day To Be Simply Successful

Aaron Potts has started a great experiment called “Simply Successful Secrets”. He has invited bloggers all around to write a post about the 5-10 things you do most days (at least 4-5 days a week) that help you be successful.

Bloggers will tag other bloggers inviting them to participate in the experiment. Each blog post is linked back to Aaron’s original post and to the person who tagged them. I saw Andy Wibbel’s invitation to participate in the experiment and below is my list of bloggers I tag.

When the conversation has run its course, Aaron will compile a master list with links to all the bloggers who participated. It is a cool meme time experiment – and one of my most passionate interests.

My Simply Successful Secrets

We live in a world that is trying to move at light speed and unless we take the time and discipline to create structures and supports that promote the qualities and experiences that we want – they are not apt to be just luckily rolling our way.

When I work with my clients to help them re-design their life to favor health, happiness, wellness, and well being the question I most often get is “Do you really do all of this stuff?” And I have to say, “I do! Absolutely, I couldn’t get by without doing these things regularly and consistently.

I pay special attention to the first hour or so of the day and the last couple of hours of the day. When I anchor myself with smart, supportive morning and evening habits all the rest of my day flows smoothly.

Here are my top five Morning simply success secrets.

1. Every day I get enough sleep the night before.

My days of micro sleeping throughout the day are over and I am now in control of my own dynamic activity by meeting my own individual sleep needs. I know I need 8 hours of sleep - making sure I get that amount of sleep is my number one priority.

The potential for peak performance is provided every morning by getting all the restful, rejuvenating sleep I require the night before. You can condition yourself to wake up after four, five or six hours but the cost to you in performance and dynamic activity is great.

On the average, for optimal functioning you need between seven and nine hours of sleep at night - some people naturally need up to ten hours a night. Every time you cut sleep short, even by a few minutes, that sleep loss accumulates. If you lose sleep every night, eventually the sleep loss is overwhelming and performance, energy, health and ultimately your success is hampered.

2. I get out of bed at the same time every morning. (No sleeping in to make up for late nights, etc.)

And I wake without an alarm clock. Blasting myself out of a sweet slumber with a shrill irritating sound just doesn’t do it for creating calm, focused high energy for the day. If you get enough sleep and have a regular wake/sleep cycle (same time up and same time to bed every day) an amazing thing happens – you naturally wake up every morning at the same time. Go figure! Could it be that a chaotic schedule creates a chaotic body?

Establishing a regular wake time starts your body clock on time every morning. If you sleep in or get up extra early on some days, your body clock goes haywire. It’s called “free running” and although the term may sound intriguing it makes you feel terrible.

Without a regular wake time your body is forced into jet lag – it’s like flying from California to New York every night. Regular morning hours synchronize your body clock. When your body is synchronized, your energy is high. When your body is “free running”, your energy is low and driven.

3. As soon as I am up I “Get In The Light.” I wake up, roll out of bed, take a quick pee and head to the light source. In the “ warm enough” weather, I go outside and sit on my gazebo. In the “too cold for me” weather I go into my mediation room and turn on my HappyLite light box.

Light is your wake up call. Early morning light stimulates better focus and energy production in the brain. Light sends a wake up call to your brain. When you flood your eyes with daylight your energy and performance will grow and last throughout the day.

Daylight is your fundamental source of clean personal energy. Light is a basic requirement for a healthy body. Sunlight is crucial to normal health and wellness.

Being exposed to adequate sunlight is essential for mental alertness, emotional well-being, and the proper production of hormones. Light deprivation can lead to stress symptoms, fatigue, mental fogginess, depression, hyperactivity, difficulty concentrating, weakened bones and teeth and weakened immune responses.

Light regulates the internal biorhythmic cycles that govern the ebb and flow of physiology and contributes to your longevity, immunity, and sexual functioning. Your body travels through many different kinds of rhythms – circadian, ultradian, seasonal, and lunar – and these rhythmic cycles are the very foundation of balance in your bodies. Screw up the rhythmic cycles and you have to expend vastly more energy just getting through the day – let alone trying to be successful doing it.

The number one key to keeping these rhythmic cycles in order is getting up at the same time every morning and getting out in the light as soon as possible. Being exposed to light at the right times and in the right amount is a great regulator. And the most important right time to get exposed to light (real outside light) is as soon as possible after waking. I am really attached to this habit – it makes me feel so good. After my morning light exposure I feel like I can tackle anything the day brings.

Read more in my article: Light and Darkness: Both are Essential to Your Natural Rhythms.

4. Brian Tracey calls it the “Golden Hour” – every successful person has some version of it. After I get settled with my Light Source I follow my version of the Golden Hour.

First off I just sit. I don’t mediate, I don’t do affirmations, and I don’t try and direct my mind or attention to anything in particular. It is about just sitting in silence. My mind is busy, busy, busy all day long, and it behooves me to stop chattering and take some time to just be. I get engulfed in the silence. I’m not even listening. I am just sitting with the silence. It is during these times of silence that I can literally feel all my energies coming into balance and as that happens problems and questions seem to resolve themselves and my creativity soars.

After I have soaked in the silence, I do some reading – but not just any reading. Your mind is very open in the morning to whatever you expose it to. So I choose my morning reading carefully – I choose beneficial propaganda. I read only those things in the morning that help me to be vibrationally aligned with what I want to happen in my life and with the kind of person I want to be. Just finished reading Ask and It Is Given, The Law of Attraction, and The Intention Experiment.

Now I am reading The Pathway, The God Effect and, The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent.

Somewhere in my Golden Hour, I also take some time and do some personal foundation writing and journaling (or journalizing as it is called in the dictionary). I journal to work out problems I am facing, understand situations that are occurring, to set my intentions and to script out what I want to happen in my life.

5. I always eat breakfast – a real one not just those packaged things in boxes that look like candy or rubber.

The first foods you have in the day are the ones that matter most throughout the day. Blood cholesterol levels are highest among those who skip breakfast. People who eat breakfast are leaner and more fit. People who eat breakfast maintain their ideal body weight easier and have a more positive attitude. They are more resilient throughout the day and have more energy and alertness. Eating breakfast moves your body’s rhythms from low and slow to high and active.

Here are my top five Evening simply success secrets.

1. I stop work on time almost every night. Once I start working, I could just keep on going. This is a key habit for me. If I follow through on it, I open the way for a whole different quality of life to happen. If I fall victim to “it would only to take a few more minutes to just do this one more thing” it detracts from the quality of my life.

This is one place I have to use discipline. I get so tempted to do one more thing and one more thing at work.

But I have learned the hard way that this makes me grouchy (and who wants to do a session with an irritable coach), gives me a headache (or stomachache or worse) and I’m just not a smart, innovative, creative and efficient person if I keep working through the night.

There is the “short view” and there is the “long view” when using strategy and this is one time when taking the “long view” pays big dividends.

2. I eat an early dinner. We used to eat at 8 PM thinking that it was a good idea to get a little extra work in. Well, that certainly was a misplaced strategy. Eating earlier in the evening means that our digestive system and liver get the rest they are suppose to have in the evening- and we feel a lot lighter and happier. When you are lighter and happier you are naturally more successful.

And I eat a real dinner – one with protein, low to moderate glycemic index /whole grain carbs, and plenty of veggies. Premium fuel for premium performance. If you eat artificial food, junk food, food contaminated with hormones, antibiotics, additives, preservatives, etc you get the same quality of performance.

3. I am growing to really love and look forward to this new habit – after dinner my husband and I go outside and do some outside physical activity. We garden, clean up the yard (a couple of acres), and do other outside chores. Lots of lifting and moving - real physical work. It feels very invigorating and has this great side benefit of getting rid of clutter and beautifying our outside environment. Exercise is great and has multiple huge benefits. And general physical activity is a great form of exercise. In days past people actually spent a good portion of their day doing physical chores and I believe that the more we live in harmony with our original design the more effective and efficient we become at living our 21st century lives.

The little extra benefit to this habit is being outside in this early evening dusk time. For years, I have made it a habit to be outside in the morning and on non-work days I am outside for hours during the day. But there is a special quality to being in nature in the evening. It’s lunar time and all kinds of energies and creatures like to venture out under the moon.

4. Doing 1, 2, and 3 in the evening means that I have a few wonderful hours for rest, relaxation, renewal and rejuvenation. In my evening routine I make time for:

• Catching up with my family. I have a big family and we need plenty of time to share and catch up with each other. If I make time for this at night, it cuts down on continual interruptions during my workday.

• Read my mail. Everyone gets it and you have to have time for it.

• Giving myself time to just do nothing. I am an empath and I have to make sure that there is time in my day where I am not continually exposed to what other people want. My work is all about connecting with other people and if I want to keep being good at that, I have to have plenty of time when I am just being with myself. Also, I think as a culture we tend to get way to preoccupied with getting things done and being productive. Everyday I need to give my body and myself a break and just stop getting things done and let myself be unproductive. One of the things I like to do while I am being unproductive is watch TV. I only watch shows that are fun and light-hearted and appeal to my sense of adventure and excitement. In the arena of being conscious and aware, watching TV has gotten bad name – so I get an extra little delight out of “being bad”. The other thing I like to do in my “unproductive time” is look through my fun magazines: Gourmet, Bon Apatite, Living, and Travelers.

• Reading- I love, love, love reading. I split my nighttime reading between journals and magazines and my current books. I read at least an hour a night and most often 2 hours every night. I subscribe to many journals and magazines to keep up with the latest research in my fields and to keep a pulse what the public is hearing about. I don’t worry about reading them on time I just keep making my way through the stack. My current night time books are: The Second Brain-Your Gut Has a Mind of Its Own; Power vs. Force; The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior; The Sonoma Diet; The Listening Hand: Self Healing Through the Rubenfield Synergy Method of Talk and Touch ; The Code; Consciously Female: How To Listen To Your Body and Your Soul For a Lifetime of Healthier Living; The Amazing Way to Reverse Heart Disease Naturally: Beyond the Hypertension Hype- Why Drugs Are Not the Answer; Tibetan Sound Healing. I get bored reading one book straight through and like to mix and match thoughts and concepts.

5. Every night I go to bed at the same time and do the same routine when getting ready for bed – this helps my body know that it is time for sleep. When my husband and I are in bed we go through our night time appreciation ritual:

• 3 things we are grateful for/appreciative of that happened today

• 1 thing we appreciate about each other

• We rotate through all the members of our family and each night talk about what we appreciate about one of our family members

• 1 thing we appreciate about our financial situation

• 1 thing we appreciate about ourselves as creators of our own lives

• 1 thing we appreciate about our wonderful dogs

• Our intentions for tomorrow and what we are going to co-create

As I drift off to sleep, I make sure I use my sleep mask so that I am sleeping in the dark. We have a skylight over our bed so true darkness is rare. City dwellers have it much worse.

Women, especially, need to sleep in the dark without a night-light. Exposure to light at night reduces your production of melatonin (a key hormonal, immune and body synchronization hormone) and interferes with proper immune and hormonal production. If you can see your hand at night there is too much light for proper hormonal production. And if you can see your hand in front of your face at night with all the lights turned off there is too much light for good quality sleep.

Those are my Top Ten Secrets for Success. I invite any blogger whose interest is peaked to join in the experiment. Don’t forget to link back here and to Aaron’s post to make sure he has you on his list.

I tag:

The Field Waves of Change

Susun Weed Wise Woman Center

Serenity Pathways

Joe Vitale

Drew Rozell

Wisdom Teachers

Lorrie Morgan Ferrero

Alexandria K. Brown

David Wood

Mark Joyner

Comments

[Aaron M. Potts]

Wow.

Mary Ann, I have read through well over one hundred entries to the Simply Successful Secrets projects and I don't think that any of them have been as "backed up with evidence" as yours has!

Not only do you have an incredible list of success habits, but you have a whole pile of great reasons for doing each of them as well.

One of the things that I have found consistently in my own personal development as well in dealing with others during my time as a personal trainer is that people do things that they believe in.

By spelling out WHY sleep, exercise, diet, etc., is good for someone, then they have a much higher compliance rate when it comes to those practices. I'm sure you can attest to that concept through your own coaching practice.

So, all I will say at this point is thank you for participating and sharing your wisdom. Very powerful stuff that people would be wise to take the time to read through.

Thanks again, Mary Ann!

[Mary Ann]

Thanks so much for your comments! I really appreciate them. It is so nice when someone really "gets" it :-)

And I just love your project and hope to see a wave of input - making the connections is interesting and fun and in the end there will be value for all and a great resource. I think a great example of a rich form of "non-zero-sumness" realizing a positive outcome for all. Thanks for thinking of it.

[Silvia]

Your points are so simple and important.
I also like the time before lunch - any simple activity or prayer before eating and later, to pay attention when the evening comes and stars appear in the sky.
Thanks for the post.

[Mary Ann]

Silvia,
Yes, taking the time to bring your focus and attention to these "everyday happenings" is how you gather your power and bring it to the present with all of its magical possibilities. Acknowledging when the day turns to night and stars are revealed allows you to be the recipient of all of the energy in that moment. Simple yet powerful.

[John]

Wow, This is an amazing read... love every bit of it... Thank you so much.