A practical guide to structuring morning routine and improving your life
By: Katarzyna Dusza
Tags: Self Improvement, Productivity, Organization, Morning Routines, Sleep

Miracle Morning

Miracle Morning is a framework for structuring a morning routine based on continuous self-reflection. The idea originates from the book of the same title by Hal Elrod. From these six books mentioned in the introduction, Miracle Morning is the foundation, whereas the other five are an invaluable extension that helps you prepare the development plan and persist in achieving your goals.

Before we start implementing the Miracle Morning routine, we have to prepare our mindset first. Clarity Questions, Wheel of Life Assessment, Your Level 10 Vision are the questionnaires to help you with that preparation. All of them you can find on 👉 miraclemorning.com under TMM 30-Day Life Transformation Challenge.

Clarity Questions

The first step is answering the Clarity Questions. They help us gain clarity and prepare the mindset for the Miracle Morning routine. Here are a few examples of these questions:

Miracle Morning — Clarity Questions

Wheel of Life Assessment

By filling out the Wheel of Life Assessment, we measure the level of success/satisfaction in every area of our life. It helps us get a clear picture of which things we are doing well, and which things we should focus on in the future.

Miracle Morning — Wheel of Life Assessment

As you can see, we have ten levels here and whatever you plan to work on next will contribute to one of the areas in the wheel.

Level 10 Vision

As the name suggests it’s your vision of a “perfect” life — where you would feel successful and satisfied. Now it’s time to answer more general questions for each of the areas mentioned in the wheel.

Miracle Morning — Level 10 Vision

👉 #Tips

Go through the Clarity Questions, the Wheel of Life Assessment, and the Level 10 Vision from time to time, e.g. once per year. Always be up to date with your priorities. Do it if you have already accomplished all your previous goals and you don’t see anything coming up.

Level 10 Habits

Level 10 Habits are small steps that we can establish now to move towards Level 10 Life. They are more detailed and more specific. Instead of coming with a general statement like “I would like to have more money” as it was in the case of Level 10 Vision, here we have actionable steps like “spending max €10 for lunch”, “start saving program”, etc.

Miracle Morning — Level 10 Habits

We have to be conscious when we come up with Level 10 Habits. Soon, we will pick up a few that we want to focus on. A friend of mine once told me “Time is precious. You have to always ask Why? in order not to focus on things that don’t matter and won’t rob you from that precious time”. That’s why before you choose a habit or a goal, ask yourself: Why do I want to pick it up? Why is it important to me right now? Are there any other things that need more attention? If you struggle to answer these questions, try to use the 5 Whys Method. It will help you find the root cause and the real purpose behind the habit you want to establish.

“Satisfaction depends not merely on having goals, but on having the right goals.” ~Drive, H. Pink

SAVERS

As soon as you prepared your mindset and answered the questionnaires, we can start with your first 30 Day Transformation. Before we jump into it, let’s quickly go through SAVERS — the foundation of the morning routine.

SAVERS is a six-step morning routine that helps us stay motivated, track the progress, and also believe we can establish new habits and accomplish our goals.

S stands for Silence 💆. Many of us have a problem taking a step back, sitting down, or just relax drinking a coffee in the morning. The Silence step is an opportunity to relax and/or re-think your life. Silence, or “relaxation” as mentioned in the Power of Habit book, is a keystone habit that helps you concentrate on even tiny moments and parts of your life. If you do meditation, or you have never tried it but you want to, this is a great opportunity to do it within this time slot.

A stands for Affirmations 💪. Affirmations are a kind of personal pushers. They could be a recap of what you have done well in the past. Have you heard something nice from your family, colleagues, or boss? Note it down and add to the Affirmations list! Write all of the positive feedback you receive and read it every day to see how much of a valuable and amazing person you are. “what people believe shapes what people achieve”, so believe in yourself! Start with simple affirmations: “Because I accomplished X, I can accomplish Y too!”.

“(…) what people believe shapes what people achieve. Our beliefs about ourselves and the nature of our abilities (…) determine how we interpret our experiences and can set the boundaries on what we accomplish.” ~Drive, H. Pink

V stands for Visualisation 💡. It’s good to visualize goals and see how we would feel when we achieve them. It helps us stay motivated. Visualization has a powerful psychological effect mentioned in the Power of Habit book.

E stands for Exercise 🏃. This one is about keeping your body healthy. You can go running or to the gym, do yoga or whatever you like 😊.

R stands for Reading 📚. This is the time slot to read books, blog posts, newspapers, or anything that you bookmarked to read.

S stands for Scribing ✍️. This is an extremely important part. We will talk about it more later, but just to give you a short introduction, Scribing is the key step to observe the progress.

30 Day Transformation

Now, let’s say we want to pick up 4 habits we want to establish:

Daily run.

Saving 5€ from lunch.

Doing a German course.

Catch up with parents.

Since we know what the SAVERS are and we chose the habits, it’s time to start the 30 Day Transformation!

Each 30 Day Transformation represents a month and starts with a table. The first six rows are SAVERS and the next four are the habits we want to establish that month. You can ask why we need 30 days and not 2 weeks? From many researches, scientists came up with the conclusion that people need 30 days to establish new habits. That’s why we have a 30 Day Transformation and not 2 weeks 😊. Let’s have a look at the table:

Miracle Morning — 30 Day Transformation Table

SAVERS and four of our Level 10 Habits are shown in the table. Now we can start doing the morning routine. Measuring the progress is very simple. The “X” means we completed the step, whereas “ — ” means we didn’t.

You have probably noticed that we have Daily run as a separate step from the Exercise. Since Miracle Morning is a framework, it’s always up to you how you want to manage it. For the Daily run, if you want to keep it under the Exercise step — it’s totally fine. If you are preparing for a marathon and it’s one of your bigger goals and you don’t want to spend too much time on it in the morning, you can create a separate habit, and do yoga under the Excercise step. Also, keep in mind that you don’t have to follow all the habits in the morning. If you prefer to go running in the evening, you can do so. The 30 Day Transformation is a way to track your progress, not a nasty reminder that forces you to do all the steps in the morning. The same goes for reading, for example. If you have to read a few books in a short period of time, it’s okay to allocate more time in the morning and create a separate habit, whereas under the Reading step you can focus on books that you want to read for pleasure.

👉 #Tips

As soon as you come up with four habits, consider having only one big goal at a time. What do I mean by that? Let’s have a look at this example:

Doing a German course.

Drinking 1l of water.

Waking up before 7 am.

Eating fruit for breakfast.

All of the habits besides the course are so-called “easy wins” — easy to do, easy to track with no additional effort. In this case, you can really focus on your main goal which is doing the German course. Now, imagine that you have two big goals at the same time, like a German course and writing a blog post. It’s very easy to put more effort into one over the another and that’s not the point. Starting your Miracle Morning routine with a course and after one hour switching back to writing a blog post could be a disaster for your mind. First you have to defocus from doing the course, and then focus again but on writing a blog post. Switching contexts is very expensive. And from my experience, I can say that having more than one big goal at a time won’t provide many benefits.

👉 #Tips

Define the priorities for your goals and pick up the ones with the highest priority or the ones that you are simply interested in. If you pick up something you are not super curious about, you will always be thinking about the more important things on your list.

👉 #Tips

It’s good to come up with mixed types of habits touching different areas of your life. For example Finances, Personal Development, Career, and Health. If you pick up four habits that only contribute to a single area, then you can neglect other areas of your life. You can get demotivated soon before you finish the 30 Day Transformation.

When to wake up?

You have set up the morning routine, but what time should you wake up? Based on the chosen habits, we have to count how much time they can take it. Let’s go back to our 30 Day Transformation table:

Miracle Morning — 30 Day Transformation Table — Time counting

Let’s say all SAVERS will take 10 minutes each. Daily run around 40 minutes. German course, let’s say 1 hour and phone call — half an hour. All of them give us around 3 hours. So if you usually start working at 10 am, and you need around 1 hour to prepare yourself for the day, you have to wake up around 6 am to do your morning routine.