How can you make your day super productive, positive, mindful and fulfilling? We cannot control the challenges, distractions and frustrations that come our way everyday. We can however prepare our body, mind and spirit to handle them all with purpose, mindfulness and compassion.
Implementing a structured daily productivity routine is the exact foundation required to handle high-stakes executive pressure without losing your focus. Here is a method to do so. Start your day with a simple 10 minutes that you will spend on doing the following activities. As you become good at it you can expand 10 minutes to 20, then 30 and go upto an hour if you want. To start with, 10 minutes is sufficient.
Breathe: Sit down comfortably, close your eyes, and breathe deeply in and out focusing your attention on the breath. Focus the mind onto the breath every time it wanders into the past or the future. Start at a few minutes and go longer as you can practice.
Meditate: Close your eyes, focus, and breathe in words that you wish to embrace: “soft”, “calm”, “love”, “joy”, “abundance”. Breathe these words in slowly and let them permeate inside you and through you. Then breathe them out and spread them to everyone. Do it for a minute or so and then keep practicing everyday.
Gratitude: Close your eyes and genuinely imagine a conversation thanking the universe for all the wonderful people and things in your life. Go through them one by one, feeling each wonderful person, each wonderful experience, and each wonderful feeling, and express gratitude for each one by one to the universe.
Compassion: Now pick a person everyday and feel what they feel during their day, feel what their greatest dream is, feel what their greatest pain is, and think of how you can help one more person achieve their dreams and manage their pain.
Prayer: Holding the omnipresent faith and love of the infinite god in your heart, pray to him or her believing your prayers will come true. Pray to whichever deity or god you believe in. Say the prayer in the words that have meaning for you.
Affirmation: State that which you seek to be as the truth. State your goals as them already having come true, describe yourself as your ideal self, and do so with deep faith in the universe’s unfailing ability to make it true. Start each sentence with “I am…”
Visualisation: Create the movie showing you achieving your dreams in your mind and see and feel in rich detail it coming true. See yourself becoming the person you want and achieving your goals.
Exercise: Workout for up to 20 to 30 minutes every day intensively with any activity of your choice: swim, run, bike, play something, or skip. If nothing else, do basic stretching, use a skipping rope, run on the spot, or learn the Surya Namaskar or Sun Salutation series in yoga (a highly accessible but incredibly effective option).
Love: Choose to be love for everyone always at all instances. Think of who you want to touch someone today with love: a call, a wish, a gift, a greeting, or a compliment.
Plan: Write down the top 1 to 3 things you want to accomplish today.
Through my corporate coaching programs, I have seen thousands of professionals use these exact operational anchors to scale their personal and professional output. This 10X method will take a few minutes to start. Don’t worry about doing everything. Do any one thing to begin with and expand from there. As you get better, you will find you can do most of them within an hour. This short time spent on making yourself better will make your day better. Everyday made better will make your world a better place.
To discover more real-world strategies for shifting your daily execution into high gear, secure your copy of my book, 10X Productive Leader.