It doesn’t take much to seem superhuman and appear “successful” to those around you.

However what appears to be true and what is actually true are rarely the same.

To bypass this trap of appearing successful remember: “What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important.” (quote from Tim Ferris in his book “Tools of Titans”)

Here are 3 tips to help kickstart your mornings:

• Take a breath. No matter how your day goes you deserve and need to take a breath. That means purposefully inhaling, filling your lungs to the max capacity, and exhaling. In any day you can find time for this single breath but I find it especially important to start your day with this single intentional action.

 

• Say yes to the things you want and no to the things you don’t want. If you feel a constant need for being involved in a lot of STUFF, there’s a great quote again by Tim Ferris that I recommend putting on a post-it note: “Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.” Practice this in your morning by choosing what you take in that day and starting off with this mindset.

(I’ve rephrased this in my own words to make it stick. “Saying yes to a lot of little mediocre things is the seemingly low entry fee to the long-term destructive marathon of being “busy.”)

• Wake up an hour before you need to be at a computer screen – staring at screens mushes your brain. For the amount of time that most of us spend staring at a screen, this hour break in the morning is invaluable.

Your mornings determine the rest of the day, kick start them.