#22 The Clarity Sessions Podcast -- Morning Affirmations

Morning affirmations can be a powerful start to your day, so I'm going to walk you through my morning affirmation process.

If you're unfamiliar with affirmations, what you do is you are deciding on a destination for your life and you are affirming that destination. You have to have a goal to get to your destination, and an affirmation is reminding you of the destination: "Yes, this is where I want to go."

So as you start a new year, a new quarter, or a new season in your life, I highly recommend that you implement my morning affirmation process so that you can remind yourself on a regular basis why you want to achieve these goals and what the goals are in the first place.

Here's the truth...it's really easy to forget about your goals. At the beginning of the year you might say, "This is the year for me to finally get fit. This is the year for me to finally improve my friendships or spend extra time with my kids." Maybe this is the year to finally get out of debt or go on a vacation.

Whatever the goal is at the beginning of the year, you have the best of intentions. That's really exciting to write down that goal and put a plan in place. But the secret tip/hack/process that has worked really well for me is a morning affirmation to get that goal in my head each and every day.

I want to walk you through exactly how I created my most recent morning affirmation.

1. Start with your vision for the year.

First I started with my annual goals. I looked at the goals with my team and with my wife, Julie, so that my goals included both business and personal direction. Together we looked at the year as if it were the perfect year. By December 31st, 2020 what would be true if I followed the plan...if I spent every day working hard, showing up, delivering for my clients, delivering for my team, doing what I need to do...what would the end of the year look like?

With this in mind, we started to envision and picture the following:

1. What would it feel like?
2. What would it look like?
3. What would the bank account look like?
4. What would fitness look like?

Like Cameron Herald's great book, Vivid Vision, we thought about the vision for a year from now. We started with the dream and mapped it out, breaking it down into quarters. What are the tangible measureables for each of the quarters? This is now at a spreadsheet level with quarterly goals.

Of course, there's going to be flexibility needed and adjustments made along the way. Sometimes things work out really well and you have results come in early, and sometimes it takes a really long time to get those results. But what I did is narrowed down my goals to five.

2. Write the narrative.

Then looking at those five goals, I drafted out an affirmation. I wrote out a narrative that is a glimpse into the future. After I wrote it, I even took a walk around the block, and I narrated it into my phone thanks to Siri that transcribes my voice. Once I had the written version and the audible version transcribed, I went through the two of them together and tweaked the narrative to what I want my day to look like in alignment with my goals.

For example, one of the goals has to do with a company we support through being an affiliate. This company has an annual conference. Instead of writing that I want to be included in the conference, I instead wrote a narrative that allowed me to picture myself walking into the conference being handed an award for achieving a certain level of success.  I put myself into that experience.

Another important thing I include when writing the narrative is to include a little greeting at the beginning: "Good morning Brian. Today's going to be an incredible day. Remember your most important goals today. Start with your people. Show up for them." This greeting is like a little pep talk for the beginning of my day.

3. Include an action step.

At this point you've planned your vision, wrote down your five goals, and have an affirmation greeting read to go. Now it's time to make sure you are moving those goals forward.

Your affirmation needs to include actions you can take that can be true any and every day. It's a way you can check your goals and make sure they move forward. Tell yourself something to push you towards action because the small steps you make each day produce big results for the future.

4. Record the affirmation.

After my narrative structure was complete in a Google Doc., then I went to the website, Upwork.com to look through different people's portfolios. My search was for a female, Irish voice. When I got the results of 20 or so people, I listened to some of their portfolio projects for voice narration or audio book narration. I created a job that I wanted this person to record my narration into an MP3 format. I wanted the affirmation to be read to me like it was from a voice in the future because a morning affirmation is like having a voice from the future, speaking into existence, who you want to be.

I had several bids for that job on the first day. I listened to one and thought: "That's the voice. That's perfect." It was $50, so it is an investment. She recorded it within 24-hours, and I listened to it right away. I sent her a couple of edits that she made, and now I have this MP3 affirmation on my phone.

*Note: If you're like me and you want to speed up the reading, use the app called BookPlayer.

Now here's what I do with the recording. In the morning I wake up at 4:00 a.m. During the first few minutes as I'm trudging downstairs, getting my water, and setting up for my Holy hour where I read the Bible and journal, I'll put my earphones in, open up BookPlayer, and I'll press play on my morning affirmation. The one I have currently takes eight minutes and 37 seconds.

I listen to this message, and I say, "Yes, that's exactly who I want to be." And then what happens is your subconscious mind goes to work making those things true. You start to have these ideas of, "Oh yeah, well if my goal is to have a hundred people sign up for this program, well, I need to have a landing page for this program. I don't have one yet." So you start to recognize the gaps and then you take action on those gaps to close them.

The morning affirmation basically says: "This is where you're headed. This is what you want to accomplish." As you listen you start to think about where the gaps are and what you need to do to make your dream a reality. I can't complete everything today. The goals are very lofty and ambitious, but there are things I can do today to close one of those gaps.

That's the power of the morning affirmation.

One morning this week it was hard for me to get up and going. I drove my kids to school, and after I dropped them off I started to notice how cold and rainy it was outside, and I didn't want to go work out. However, I knew I should, so I opened my BookPlayer app and started listening to my affirmation again. After about three minutes in I thought, "Okay fine. I'm going to the gym." I came home, put on my workout clothes, and went over to the gym. I have this one-hour daily workout, and I went through the whole workout fired up because I listened to that morning affirmation.

If you don't have a recorded morning affirmation, I highly encourage you to take action to implement this process in your life. It will be a game changer for you.

Click here to listen to the full episode.

I hope this has served you. If you feel stuck in this process, don't hesitate to reach out! I offer clarity coaching services where we can walk through this process together and get you clear on your vision, goals, and action steps to get there. Click here for more information.