☕ The Miracle Morning Part 2: Affirmations
One letter at a time
Week 3 of The Miracle Morning: Visualization. See your future, achieve your goals.
I’ve had a morning routine for years. It typically goes something like this:
Before I go to bed: Roll out my yoga mat and set the coffee pot
Get up between 4 and 4:30
Drink some water with lemon and Himalayan salt
Do some stretches and pushups
Pour my coffee
Head to my desk
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
I credit having a routine with most of the progress that I’ve made as a writer. It’s pretty simple, but before I started, I would stumble to the coffee pot, slump into my chair, and scroll Twitter while I waited for my eyes to fully open.
This routine is a nice cue to actually open my eyes. But I was ready for a revamp.
I’ve always gotten a lot of morning routine inspiration from Lauryn Bosstick from The Skinny Confidential, and I’ve heard of The Miracle Morning a few times, but it wasn’t until the author, Hal Elrod, came onto her podcast that I scrambled to Amazon to buy the book (you can also find it on Thriftbooks).
The S.A.V.E.R.S Method
Hal survived a head-on collision when he was in his early 20s and the doctors said he would never walk again. It was bad. He credits his recovery from this and from a later cancer diagnosis with the principles that have come to be The Miracle Morning. The routine can take as little as 6 minutes or as much as 60, but it’s really up to you.
Since I’m reading the book and just finished the first “S” section, Silence, I thought it would be cool to break down each section here as I go. I’ll start with S and then add as I move through the rest of the book.
That way, you can follow along and build your own Miracle Morning right along with me! Here’s what S.A.V.E.R.S stands for
Silence
Affirmations
Visualization
Exercise
Reading
Scribing
🔇Silence
The first step in the Miracle Morning is to sit in silence for a few minutes. This allows time for your brain to wander (which I learned all about in Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi). Hal says you can spend your silence in prayer, meditation, gratitude, breathwork, contemplation, or a combination of any of them.
The goal here is “to have a daily method for quieting your mind, calming your nervous system, reducing your stress, feeling at peace, improving your mental and emotional well-being, and consistently experience heightened clarity that will allow you to focus on what’s most important in your life.”
That seems like a tall order, but I think we underestimate how valuable a little bit of silence can be.
To put it a different way, in Bored and Brilliant, Manoush found that when we “space out,” we activate our brain’s default mode. “When we lose focus on the outside world and drift inward,” she writes, “we’re not shutting down. We’re tapping into a vast trove of memories, imagining future possibilities, dissecting our interactions with other people, and reflecting on who we are.”
What I’m doing: After I get up, I fill a glass of water, sit on my yoga mat (I use a blanket my Nana crocheted as a cushion), and set the timer on my watch for 5 minutes. I started with 2 minutes, but it went so fast that I increased it. Then, I just sit and breath. If I feel like my head is going too fast, I’ll think in, in, in and then out, out, out as I’m breathing.
I’ve been surprised by how quickly the time goes, and if I can get up a little earlier, I’d like to up it to 10 minutes. No life changing revelations yet, but it definitely feels nice.
If you try this, let me know how it goes 👇
🗣️Affirmations
Anytime I hear the word “affirmations,” I think of the Sex and the City episode where Charlotte drags Carrie to a seminar on affirmations, and Carrie subsequently drags the speaker.
Not only was this an amazing moment of a friend firmly sticking up for someone she loves, it brings to light the issues with the way we’ve seen affirmations put into practice. Hal points out two flaws with the way we think about and use affirmations:
Lying to yourself doesn’t work: He specifically uses affirmations like “I am wealthy” and “I am happy.” If you’re not actually those things, then it feels disingenuous to say that you are.
Passive language doesn’t produce meaningful results: Saying “I am a money magnet. Money flows to me effortlessly and in abundance” puts the onus on the money. It’s passive and doesn’t lead to action on your part. (To be fair, when I was struggling with money mindset, I repeated “money flows to me freely and easily” every time I had a negative thought, but I took a lot of actions towards making money.)
Here’s his formula for creating meaningful and powerful affirmations that focus on the active language.
Step 1: Affirm what you’re committed to. Basically, say the outcome or activity that you’re committed to achieving or doing. This could be increasing your income, exercising, keeping your house clean, etc. You can create affirmations for different areas of your life — financial, personal, relationships, etc.
Step 2: Affirm why it’s important to you. The more important this affirmation is, the more committed to it you will be. Think about how achieving this goal will enhance or change your life.
Step 3: Affirm which actions you’ll take and when. This is where things get real. Actually write down the action steps you’ll take to stick with what you’re committed to. This also aligns with strategies in Atomic Habits. If you’re committed to exercising everyday because you want to be healthy for your kids, the actions could be to set a specific time each day to work out, or put on workout clothes when you get dressed in the morning, or fill your water and then start right away.
Affirmations are fluid, so you can adjust them as needed. If you’ve achieved the thing you’re committed to or realize that the steps you identified aren’t working, you can revise the affirmation.
These affirmations will lead you directly into visualization, which I’ll add next week!
💭Visualization
Visualization gives you the chance to rehearse your choices and actions before you actually have to perform them in order to optimize your chances of meeting your goals.
There are three steps to visualizing your ideal outcomes using your affirmations:
Step 1: Get into the ideal mindset. Really get into the feeling that you’ll feel when you achieve your goals. Hal says, “It’s time to suspend any fears, insecurities, or concerns with what other people think and get into a mindset of possibility. What do you really want? Forget about self-imposed limitations you may have clung to.”
Step 2: Visualize your ideal outcome. What will it look like when you achieve your goals? If you want to get healthier, see yourself playing tag with your kids or how you’ll look in your clothes. If you want to earn a certain amount of money, visualize what your bank account will look like. Make sure these visualizations are as vivid as possible.
Step 3: Visualize the actions necessary to achieve the outcome. Maintain the feeling that you created at the beginning of the visualization and “see yourself engaged in the actions you’ve decided you need to do today and make sure you envision yourself enjoying the process. I’ve been using this step to plan my meals for the day to make sure I stay on track with my health and eating goals.
Hal recommends doing visualization right after affirmations, so you can visualize what you’ve just affirmed. I’m still practicing this. For me, the visualization is more difficult than the silence step because it takes more focus, but I can definitely already see the benefits.
And as always, if you have any questions about freelancing (getting started, getting clients, finding your niche, etc), work/life balance, morning routines, Substack, the upcoming Freelance Foundations Course…I’m happy to answer!
Coming soon…
🏃♀️➡️Exercise
📖Reading
📝Scribing
If you’re enjoying this newsletter and want me to be even more caffeinated, you’re always welcome to buy me a coffee ☕🤗 or check out the resources I’ve posted over there. Plus, you can check out more resources below!
Resource Roundup
Here’s a list of freelance writing resources from me and from other writers!
Freelance Writing Toolkit: I rounded up a bunch of resources and tools to help you get started as a freelancer or even level-up if you’ve been doing this for awhile.
Goal Check-In Worksheet: It’s easy to set goals at the beginning of the year and then forget all about them as the year goes on. This Goal Check-In Sheet gives you a spot to revisit your goals and then decide whether you need to keep working towards it or revise it as you move forward through the year.
Managing Money Together: I created this workbook to help couples manage their money together. Talking about money can be hard, but this workbook walks you through fun, low-pressure exercises to get the conversation started.
20 (Financial) Questions for Road Trips and Date Nights: If you’re heading out on a road trip or settling in for date night with your partner, grab these questions that you can ask each other and get to know more about each other’s relationship with money. You might be surprised what you learn!
Savings Account Management Form: I’ve used this spreadsheet for years to keep track of our sinking funds and savings account.
20+ Pitches That Worked (Diana Kelley Levey): Diana pulled together 24 examples of freelance article pitches that she turned into paid assignments, and you can see them! When you get this, you’ll also get her ebook 100+ Tips for Beginner Freelance Writers.
Case Study Accelerator (Cody DeBos): I bought Cody’s Case Study Accelerator course, and it’s fantastic. It’s a deep dive into what makes a good case study that includes how to send pitches, understanding why writing case studies is a lucrative niche, how to structure them, and more.
ContentOS (Solene Rauturier): Solene is a Notion wiz, and she created the ContentOS system to help you pull all of your content ideas into one place and turn them into publish-ready posts. Plus, her Substack The Clarity Circle is a great read!
Morse Code Prints: This is random, but a few years ago, I created some morse code prints and put them on Ebay. They’re really cute!
I’ll keep adding to this, so if you have any great resources, send them my way!