“MOM!! I don’t want to wear pants to school today!!!” This is how I get woken up some mornings. In the middle of winter. By my son, who hates pants. It’s not that he refuses to wear clothes to school (thank goodness for that, at least), but he just wants to wear shorts. ALL THE TIME.
When my precious child wakes me up with some clothes-related emergency it starts my day with alarm bells going off. And I don’t like that. I have learned over many years of practice, failing, and practicing some more, that if I want to be my best self, I need to get out of bed on my own terms with the intention of owning my mindset from the moment I get up in the morning. I need to catch my thoughts and harness them before they get away from me and take on a life of their own - which I must admit can be pretty negative, snarky, and generally annoyed if I’m not careful.
How we start our day sets the tone for the rest of our day. We get to decide how we show up, the person that we are going to be, the attitude we are going to have, and the way we are going to respond to the stressors that life is inevitably going to throw our way. That’s so powerful. We just need to take hold of that power first thing in the morning.
I’m going to tell you how in a second, but first since I’m me and I can’t help myself, I have to get a little sciencey and tell you what’s actually happening inside our bodies in the pants-induced-histeria-wake-up scenario.
As humans, we have two modes to our nervous system, fight or flight mode, and rest and digest mode. Think of them as being in a state of stress or a state of peace and calm. In stress mode, our bodies are pumping out all sorts of hormones to get us going, to make us super alert, to get us ready to run away from danger, put out fires, and survive the threats around us. That’s just how we’re made as humans, we want to survive. That response is really good and important and essential to our survival. However, when we start our day in a state of stress, it’s much more likely to carry over throughout the rest of our day unless we are really intentional about shifting ourselves out of it.
If we aren’t careful, we can end up stuck in that fight or flight mode most of the time, living on auto-pilot and on this downward slide of stress, burn out, overwhelm, and exhaustion wondering why we have these weird symptoms, our guts are a mess, we’re sick all the time, we have no energy, can’t lose weight, and don’t feel like ourselves anymore.
Now, our stress can be real life stuff, illness, infections, our diet, our lifestyle habits, or it can just be our thoughts. That’s right, we can start our day in stress mode without anything even happening. We can get there without even opening our eyes simply by the thoughts we start thinking first thing in the morning.
So, the way I see it, if we can shift ourselves into stress mode with our thoughts, then we can shift ourselves out of stress mode with our thoughts too. It just takes a little awareness, intention, and action on our parts to change the whole course of our day (and dare I say, lives?!).
The way I started taking my power back was by simply starting my day with quiet time for myself before anyone else woke up. This time became so precious to me, made me a better me, a better mom, a better wife, and allowed me to shift back into a state of positivity, patience, and much more peace in my daily life. It’s pretty powerful stuff.
Once I realized how life changing it was, I wanted to create something for you to do the same thing, so I created 10 Minutes of Intention.
This is how it works:
Start your day with intention. Specifically, 10 Minutes of Intention for seven days and see where it takes you.
Get up on purpose. You might have to set your alarm a few minutes earlier to give yourself enough time.
Set aside 10 minutes where you do nothing else other than spend quiet, quality time with yourself.
Go through the 10 Minutes of Intention exercise to start your day with positivity, gratitude, and a plan for the day ahead.
Own your mindset from the moment that you wake up and see how that changes your day.
I created the 10 Minutes of Intention Challenge as a simple way for you to start your day in a calm, peaceful state where you can decide how you are going to show up, who you are going to be, and manifest the things that you want out of your day.
This is your life and you get to decide how you live it. Are you who you want to be?
I’m so pumped for you to give it a try and to hear about how just 10 minutes of intention in the morning for one week changes your life.