Morning Routine for People Who Hate Mornings

My Morning Routine Expectation:

I wake up moments before my 5am alarm, feeling refreshed. I jump out of bed, drink a tall class of water with a freshly squeezed lemon before hitting the yoga mat for a 30 minute yoga and meditation session. Now it’s time for my berry smoothie and journaling. Next, hit the gym! I love a morning workout, I just feel so refreshed. There’s still plenty of time to have a shower, wash my hair, blow dry it, do my makeup, pick a cute outfit, brush my teeth and read a quick chapter of my book before starting my day.

My Morning Routine Reality:

The alarm goes. SNOOZE. Again. SNOOZE. Again. SNOO – oh shoot, is that the time already?! I debate whether I have time to have a shower or if I should just throw on yesterdays outfit. I scoff a bowl of Weetabix cereal in under 90 seconds and tie my shoe laces in between bites.

That’s a classic morning for me. Any morning person will tell you I just need to get up earlier, but they’re wrong. Because getting up earlier means I would have to go to sleep earlier – and night time is my optimal functioning hours. 7pm-2am and I’m at my absolute best. All my great ideas happen then!

However, the personal development industry is filled with people talking about their 5am wake-ups, long morning routines and hour-long morning yoga sequences. It’s the ONLY way to be successful.

Well, I’m not convinced. Pushing night owls to become morning larks isn’t a great strategy. While it might mean we get to work on time, it does mean sacrificing our ‘genius hours’ in the evening. Either that, or sleep (and we all know sacrificing sleep is not a good long-term strategy).

So here’s my solution.

As a night owl through and through, I want to offer you fellow night owls an alternative:

The evening routine.

The evening routine is just like the morning routine, but instead you’re prepared before you even wake up (to me that sounds even more effective than planning when you wake up!).

Here is how I prep for the day the night before:

• Write out my to-do list for the next day, using a productivity planner.

• Visualize my long-term goals and make sure my plan for the next day reflects that.

• Do a guided meditation

• Do some push-ups if I haven’t already gotten them in earlier

• Do my gratitude journal with my partner Daniel, and read them out to each other

• Pack my bag with anything I need for the next day

• Read a book (not something too stimulating!)

• Sleep

In the morning, I have a mini morning routine. It looks like this:

1. Wake up, and DON’T check my phone, emails or notifications (high performance studies show that you will be up to 30% more productive throughout your day if you don’t check email for at least an hour after you wake up.)

2. Take my vitamins

3. Have a gratitude shower (listing everything I’m grateful for for the entire duration of the shower)

4. Get dressed

5. Eat breakfast (this is almost always a bowl of Weetabix – occasionally I make a smoothie if everyone else in the house is awake, otherwise the noise wakes people up!)

6. Check my to-do list I wrote the night before

7. Hit the day!

8. Check-in with the world (At this point, after I’ve done some work, I’m allowed to check my emails and notifications. I never, ever check the news. I never have, and I never ever will in the morning. I don’t want the chaos of the world entering my consciousness first thing in the morning!)

This list looks long, but really, it can be done in 20 minutes. It’s effective because in the evening I have already done the preparation, and now it’s time to just GO!

Would you try the mini morning routine and the evening routine as a replacement for the pressure of an elaborate morning routine? Let me know in the comments!

Learning lessons from 300 days of Meditation

I can’t believe it’s been 300 days since I made the commitment to meditate every day for a year. For the whole month of December, I meditated every day without any guided help, but I’m grateful to be back with my guided audios. I’m far less distracted when I have a path to follow.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the last 300 days:

1. Don’t meditate right before bed, or you’ll fall asleep. I still haven’t mastered this one, but I’m getting better. I’d rather meditate right before bed than to not mediate at all. They key is to sit up straight. If I lie down, I’m toast.

2. I don’t think it’s had a profound impact on my life, but I do think if I stopped meditating, it would have a negative impact. I really enjoy making meditation a part of my day – even if it’s only 2 minutes of focused breathing (doing some meditation is better than doing none!)

3. Doing it in the morning is better, but after 300 days of struggling to do it first thing when I wake up, I’ve realised daily morning meditation is probably not going to happen, and that’s okay. I’m a night owl. I prefer to meditate in the evening when I need a break from the day, but not too late or I’ll fall asleep (see point no. 1). After a discussion with a fellow High Performance Coach the other day, I realised that if mornings aren’t my optimal time, doing a lengthy morning routine isn’t necessarily the best thing for me. Crafting a shorter routine I can do no matter how late I wake up (hello, listing my blessings and drinking some hot water while I hurry to find socks that aren’t odd). I think I’m going to do a post about my mini morning routine!

4. I struggle to just be. I know, we’re human beings, not human doings, but my ambitious drive gets in the way sometimes. I want learn to meditate to meditate, not to check it off my to do list. Doing guided meditations helps with this a lot, but I also know that I still need to work on it. Perhaps that will be my challenge once I hit 365 days (ha, yes, I see the irony of setting a challenge to be in the moment and not be making it everything a challenge all the time!).

5. It’s still not a fully engrained habit. Whoever said you need 21 days to form a habit is seriously misinformed 😂😂😂Getting my butt onto the meditation pillow is still a challenge every single day. Why do we resist the things we love?

6. The most important thing is to just keep meditating. I know that it’s a lifelong skill to hone, and I’m in it for the long run.

Do you meditate daily? What are your best tips? Let me know in the comments below.

Who needs you on your A-game?

Sometimes it’s not enough to be on your A-game for yourself. When you get to breaking point, you need to dig deeper and find out who you are really pursuing your goal for.

When I’m all out of energy or I feel like giving up, I ask myself:

Who could I be a better role model for?

Who needs me to show up 100% for them?

Who needs me on my A-game?

The answer is often one of my clients, or my partner, Daniel. I want to be an example of what is possible. I want to practice what I preach. When I’m exhausted and I feel like giving up – for whatever reason – being of high service to my clients or Daniel keeps me going. I think, about how I would support them in this situation.

If you’re feeling like you can’t keep going, answer those three questions and you’ll be unstoppable.

What Commitment Actually Means

Are you committing to trying to make your goals happen?

Or are you committing to making your goals happen?

Because there’s a big difference.

When you commit to trying you’re not really making a true commitment. You’re making a temporary, half-hearted, ‘hopefully, I can do it’ attempt at your dreams.

Would we have got to the moon if we had committed to trying?

51 years ago, going to the moon was impossible. We didn’t have the right equipment or the right understanding. Even up until the last minute, we didn’t know how to do it.

But NASA didn’t commit to trying, we committed to making it happen, no matter what, whatever it takes.

And THAT is why it happened.

So decide today that you are going to stop trying to make your goals happen, and instead commit to making your goals happen. No matter what. Whatever it takes.

Yin & Yang

With my own coach yesterday, I discovered something that is blindingly obvious but I hadn’t noticed about myself: For the last year I’ve been functioning at about 95% masculine energy in my life.

I’m all about DOING. Go. Pushing. Impossible. Breaking limits. Taking action. Making decisions. Committing. Hustling. Working. 24/7. Planning. Doing.

I love that about myself – don’t get me wrong. I think that my masculine energy is what has got me to where I am in my life with my relationships and my business and my health. I’m all about making things happen. But I know that what got me here won’t get me there, so now it’s time to allow things to happen.

Now is time to bring back the BEING. Letting go. Allowing. Ease. Expansiveness. Wholeness. Patience. Tenderness. Acceptance. Softness.

Yin and yang (feminine and masculine) are two parts of the same whole. They are a balance.

And I’ve been so far off balance I think I forgot what yin was.

This is my challenge to myself (notice that masculine language!) to go to the next level with my goals, and bring back the balance of yin and feminine: Learn to just be.

I removed some of my daily habits from my habit tracker (My motto is still: If it matters, do it daily – but now I’m being more considerate about what actually matters!), and I’m practicing letting things be.

I look forward to giving you an update and seeing if this girl can bring some balance back into her life.

The Mindset of an Inventor

I’ll admit it, I’m a chronic planner. Since I was old enough to write, I’ve filled journals from cover to cover with ideas, schemes and plans – belated apologies to my childhood friends who played my unassuming test subjects.

Initially, I thought I wanted to be an inventor (yes, like Professor Floop from Spy Kids or Edna Mode from The Incredibles. They were – and still are – my inspirations.) and to this day I still consider myself one (I’ve just invented a membership called Impossible Incubator, which essentially helps other people invent and live out their wildest dreams).

NOTE: Add ‘Inventor’ to my business card please, Barbara.

But now I’m realising that while it is a great strength to have new ideas and inventions all the time, the greatest strength is in following through on a plan. The greatest plan in the world is no use if it’s never put to work. I have to wonder how many life-changing inventions have never come to fruition because the inventor never made it out of the drawing-room.

Here’s how I made things happen up to this point: I just tried stuff.

And I failed a bunch of times. And I’m sure as anything I will fail many more times in the future.

In 2001 I made an “air hostess bag” (a suitcase with wheels) using a cardboard box and a set of bicycle training wheels and carried it around for 20 minutes before it fell apart.

In 2003 I made an eco-friendly marble run out of toilet roll tubes and a hot glue gun and gave it my friend Tim for his 8th birthday (this was back before eco-friendly was trendy yet. He wasn’t impressed.)

In 2007 I sold homemade cookies on the side of the road and I didn’t even sell one (although I did get invited to join the local baptist church – I declined).

In 2004 I started a ‘makeup company’ with my friend Ruth, it was called Mischief Makeup (or MMU, our secret code at school) and we made blush and eyeshadow from grinding up different coloured chalk with her mum’s cheese grater).

In 2011 I started a 2 man dance crew where the other member almost never showed up to practice.

In 2015 I started a food charity for homeless people in Wellington but it only ran for one night.

In 2017 I started an ethical vegan t-shirt line and I *only* sold two t-shirts.

In 2018 I started a travel blog until I realised I didn’t want to be a travel blogger.

None of them worked.

But who knows what hundreds of other ideas WOULD have worked, if only I’d got them off the paper and into the world?

Like my water-alarm doorbell (2005) or my school cheerleading team (2008), or my treehouse (minus the tree) in the backyard (2007) or my robot suit (2002), or my before-school disco parties (2012) or my alcohol-free party drink (2015) or my thermal-lined jeans (2016) or my online Instagram course (2018)? I’ve got evidence that I spent hours planning out of all of these ideas in journals, and now they’re sitting in a cardboard box in my Mum’s garage collecting dust. Rest in peace, robot suit.

But the proof is in the pudding! According to my definitely not fact-checked source, the original saying is “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” In other words, you’re only going to find out if something works if you try it.

Don’t you just adore those wild and wacky inventors who just TRY stuff, knowing that they’ll probably fail? They are so dedicated to their smell-gun or their time machine or their dog-translator idea that they never seem to give up trying different ways to make it work.

What if you gave yourself permission to just start trying stuff? Start the blog. Write the book. Build the Spy Den. Open the shop. Make the jewelry.

No one wants to hear the story of the inventor who had the perfect plan and it worked the first time.

You’ve got brilliant ideas buried inside you. Bring them to life, watch them die and try again! Enjoy the process. Believe in your magic. Have patience. Never give up.

That is the mindset of an inventor.

The Opposite of Perfection is Freedom

Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good. - John Steinbeck

And then a response.

Now that you don’t have to be good, you can be free. - Elizabeth Gilbert

Give yourself permission to let go of perfection in favour of goodness.

And then go deeper and let go of goodness in favour of freedom.

The opposite of perfection isn’t imperfection, it’s freedom.

What if you just allowed yourself to be free? If there was no measure of perfect or even good?

When I post this quote on Instagram today, it’s going to get far fewer views than usual because my face isn’t in it. But guess what?

I’ll be free.

Free from comparison, free the torment of my mind asking “which picture suits my feed style best next?” or “how many likes will this photo get?”

Fuck all of that. I even want to go back and edit that word out (what will the neighbours think??). But I won’t. I don’t have to be perfect. I don’t even have to be good.

Because guess what?

I’m free.

The Power of Visualization

Imagine going to your kitchen, picking up a lemon, slicing through it and biting straight into it, juice squeezing out into your mouth.

Can you feel your tongue go tingly?

That’s the power of visualization.

Why does it work? Because the brain can’t tell the difference between reality and imagination.

Researchers have found that the mental practice of a skill can be just as effective as physical practice. How wild is that? You can literally imagine running a race over and over in your mind, and it will help you progress with your running. That’s because the same regions of your brain are being activated.

Athletes can only train for a certain number of hours a day before their body fatigues. So that means two people putting in the same number of hours would have the same shot at winning a race. But then, those who go home and spend another several hours visualizing – their entrance into the water or onto the pitch or into the ring, their action on the starting gun, their last exertion – could have a giant advantage of over their competition (23% according to this study!).

That means that visualization is one of the most powerful tools we have to propel us towards our goals.

David Beckham does it. Steve Jobs did it. Olympic athletes do it. Today I’m starting it!

I have committed to a practice of visualization for each of my impossible goals, with music and my vision board. I’m excited to let you guys know how it goes – stay tuned.

Have you ever done visualization? Let me know in the comments!

What if you squeezed a decade into a year?

If someone told you that you had 24 hours to raise $500,000 or you’d die, do you think you’d be able to get hold of the money?

Hell yes. You’d beg your neighbours, rob a bank vault, or start a viral crowdfunding campaign.

We’ve got preconceived ideas about what we can do in a certain amount of time, but based on what?

My gorgeous friend and coach Nicole Middleton shared an idea with me today in our weekly Impossible Incubator Mastermind Call.

She shared that time is just an illusion (true), and therefore, there’s absolutely no reason why we think we need to wait to achieve our goals. It’s only our mindset that is holding us back. It’s only what we consider “doable” in a certain amount of time.

But some of the greatest discoveries and inventions were made because of a race against time.

Going to the moon
The enigma code
Flying an airplane
Fossil discoveries

If time is only a limitation of our own minds, then just imagine what we could accomplish if we let go of the notion of time.

IT WOULD BLOW OUR MINDS.

What 10-year goal do you have that you could actually accomplish in one year?

My Biggest Learning Lesson of 2019

Today I’ve got a video for you guys! If you read my 2020 Goals Post you’ll know it’s one of my goals to put one out every week – and I’m super stoked I did it today (procrastination takes me down the hardest when it comes to creating video content because I USED to believe (changing my mindset on this) that it was a lot of work. Now I’ve chosen to believe it’s effortless for me to create video content. New mantra: I create videos with ease!

This video is all about the thing that changed my life in 2019, and has now become my motto.

P.S. Thank you to all my subscribers! <3 I’ve reached 351, which is actually SO many if you think about it (Can you imagine if you all came to my house?! You wouldn’t fit!). I am so grateful for every individual subscriber and every view. Your time is precious so thank you for spending it on my content. I hope to serve you as best as I possibly can, so let me know what video you want to see next.