Make Your Morning Routine STICK for GOOD

Learn how to make your perfect 3M morning routine actually stick no matter where you are! It's great to have a consistent morning routine at home, but what about when you're on vacation, staying at a friends, traveling for business or something like that? Lunden shares some insight to help make your healthy habits and routines doable when you're not in your "normal" space.

Episodes mentioned:
Ep. 2 Morning Routine 3M Formula

Timestamps:

(0:00)  Intro

(1:59) Morning Routine 3M Formula

(2:40) How long should your morning routine be?

(4:10) Being flexible with your morning routine

(5:00) Finding your morning flow anywhere

(8:45) How to WIN in the morning

(10:34) Successful people & morning routines

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:59 Morning Routine 3M Formula
• 2:40 How long should your morning routine be?
• 4:10 Being flexible with your morning routine
• 5:00 Finding your morning flow anywhere
• 8:45 How to WIN in the morning
• 10:34 Successful people & morning routines

Transcript

Lunden Souza: [00:00:01]

Welcome to Self Love and Sweat, THE PODCAST. The Place where you'll get inspired to live your life unapologetically, embrace your perfect imperfections, break down barriers and do what sets your soul on fire. I’m your host, Lunden Souza.

Lunden Souza: [00:00:21]

Hey friend, it’s me, Lunden Souza, online lifestyle transformation coach. I help people all over the world, just like you, who know they are meant for more, get their mind right and their body tight and go from crazy busy to crazy happy. And hey, if it’s our first time meeting….Welcome, so happy to have you!

 [00:00:41] Lunen Souza

And if you’ve been with us for a while, it’s so great that you’re here too. I’m really excited to share this episode of the Self Love & Sweat THE PODCAST with you.

[00:01:04] Lunden Souza 

Hey, happy today. Welcome to our podcast. Today I want to talk to you about something that was actually inspired by a conversation I had with a client of mine that's been a client of mine for a long time in a variety of different ways. She was first my in-home personal training client that I worked with when I first got started in my early twenties, and she's also been an online client of mine in a group setting as well as one-on-one periodically. So I feel like she's been consistently finding what she needs and what works for her and what style of coaching works best for her throughout the last ten years of working with me and it's been really cool. So her and I had a really awesome conversation today regarding morning routines and the power of them and how great we feel when we are in flow with our morning routine. Now I'll just go through a quick overview of my  3M formula for a morning routine. This is how I coach it. I also have a podcast episode I'll put in the show notes that is dedicated to the morning routine and breaking it down bit by bit. But this one, I just kind of want to share how to make it work and how to make it fit all the time and throughout different phases of your life. And give you some examples from this conversation and from my life that I think will be helpful and valuable for you. 

[00:02:33] Lunden Souza 

So the 3M formula for a morning routine that will help you go from madness to magic in the morning is mindset, movement and me time.  And if you listen to the extended version of this on the podcast, I go into much more detail about it.  Your morning routine can be as long as you have, right? 5 minutes, 10 minutes, an hour or 2 hours, whatever. And those three components should be present in whatever way it suits you. So whatever works for you to get your mind right for the day. Do that! Movement in whatever form, whether it's your workout, dancing, a dynamic, warm up, a walk outside, a little quick, yoga flow, whatever. Just something to get into your body and then me time. Something that is just for you. Just smelling your coffee and enjoying it in peace, learning something new, just whatever might feel like you're lovin' on you... do that in your me time. So when it comes to this morning routine, her and I were talking about  real life scenarios that are happening right now in our lives. So I have been traveling a lot from the East Coast to the West Coast. My boyfriend lives in North Carolina, so I've been going back and forth, spending time where I live in Southern California, visiting my family and my niece in Central California, and then going to the East Coast to spend time with him and another one of my close friends from college that lives on the East Coast.

[00:04:05] Lunden Souza 

And what I found is I love my morning routine. It's really important to me. It's so valuable. It makes me feel so good. It makes me feel so connected. It helps me communicate better. It helps me set my intentions for the day and it can be completely malleable. It doesn't have to be the same in all of those different locations, and it probably won't be. And the bigger win is not duplicating it the exact same in every location. The bigger win is figuring out what's going to work for my environment at the time. It's summertime at the time of recording this and maybe you find yourself on family vacation or doing something different. In this particular season,  maybe the kids are out of school, so your routines are different. It's like you have to be able to roll with the punches and utilize your tools in new ways, right? It's not just like this is the way we do it and it has to be very robotic and always the same. No, your morning routine is malleable and it should be malleable. And that's what I realized. I was getting kind of frustrated when I was spending time on the East Coast, like with going visiting my boyfriend and my friends. I wasn't it wasn't overwhelming frustration. It was just that feeling of like, I really want to find my morning flow. I really want to find my routine. 

[00:05:20] Lunden Souza 

And what I do schedule wise is different. And then, of course, when I'm on the East Coast, it's 3 hours ahead of the West Coast. So like the times that I have my client calls are different. And just  what I do throughout my day when I'm alone and doing my thing on the West Coast is different than when I'm with my boyfriend and with my friends on the East Coast wanting to visit with him and spend time with him. Right? So I found that I was kind of getting frustrated trying to figure out how to make what was working on the West Coast over on the East Coast. And I realized I just probably will have a different routine. My setup and lifestyle will be slightly different when I go to bed and wake up and what I do throughout the day is going to be different. So instead of fighting it, how can I make it fit and just have it be slightly different, right? So it just really is the way that it is. And my morning routine when I'm in Southern California, I live with a close friend of mine. She's like my sister and I live with her family and it's really awesome. And they go out of town a lot and like right now in June, they are spending time at their house in Arizona. 

[00:06:33] Lunden Souza 

So I have I'm at the house when I am here by myself. So my morning routine is different when they're here versus when I'm here by myself. Just because, there's people here some mornings and so sometimes I feel like, oh, I can wake up a little bit earlier and get like some organizational stuff done in the morning after I do my morning whereas if people are here, I'm not going to wake up super early and move things around and like people are sleeping and at 6:00 in the morning, you know. Just the way that I live and schedule my day is different depending on the environment. And I found that being flexible in that approach to my habits makes them stick a lot longer. Instead of just beating myself up against running up against a wall and hitting your head and then running back up against it again and hitting your head, it's like, isn't there a better way? Can't there be a better way than just continuing to try the same thing? And so that's really been super helpful. And so my client and I were talking about just kind of different real-life things happening. And she's  getting ready to go on vacation. And so doing her workouts with weights aren't going to be as available. More band work and body weight training and walking is going to be really what her workouts and stuff like that look like, which is like, great. 

[00:07:52] Lunden Souza 

Her morning routine and flow will be different because you're going to be with family versus in your house by yourself. It's just like roll with those punches and believe in your capabilities to figure things out and find a way and kind of switch things about versus obsessing over them staying the same. And you'll be in a much, much happier space. And so this really goes with anything, right? But we're specifically talking about the morning routine because we might find ourselves in different phases of our lives and different seasons of the year, different motivational phases, different seasons in terms of what our body might need and want in the morning. Right? So tune in and give yourself credit for what you do know about your body. Seek out to learn and grow through different situations, and you'll find that the more flexible you can be, the better. Right? We beat ourselves up a lot, right? We beat ourselves up a lot for not living up to par or being up to par and getting things done the way they should. It's like, okay, well, let's adjust the rules a little bit. Let's give ourselves more opportunities to succeed. Our 3M formula can be switched around a little bit depending on where I am and what I have available. So let's not let it be like either I did it or I didn't as the win. But let's give ourselves more opportunities and more checkboxes to check off for success. 

[00:09:16] Lunden Souza

If I wake up and do it this way, that's a win. If I wake up and do it that way, that's a win. If I'm over here and these are my circumstances and I do my morning routine like this, that's a win. If there is an intentional 3M formula morning routine done in anywhere between 5 minutes to 2 hours, depending on what I'm doing and where I'm at and what's going on... That's a win, right? And I get to decide that. But half the time we're going 1000 bajillion miles an hour, you know, thinking we have to do the perfect morning routine and all the things perfect. If we just take a moment to rearrange things a little bit, re-analyze a little bit, maybe you have watched the movie "Clueless" before, maybe you haven't, and you're going to think I'm weird. But the part where Cher's like, "If we could just go to the kitchen, rearrange some things, increase some place a place settings." And I always think of that when it comes to just like making things work, just rearrange it.  Rearrange things a little bit, resolving that kind of puzzle and making it, rearranging it in new ways in order to make things work is where it's at. So rearrange things, increase what you need, take some things out, make it work for you. 

[00:10:28] Lunden Souza 

So, you know, our morning routines are important, super important. And I'll kind of finish here and wrap it up and say that if you find someone that you admire that's successful, whether it's like a professional athlete or someone that you admire in your community or whatever, ask them, what do you do in the morning? I bet you anything they have some sort of morning routine, some sort of something that sets them up for the day in the way that they want to show up. So yeah, ask yourself, what are you doing in the morning? What's your morning routine look like? How can you make it work for you and then reach out to someone that you admire or do some research on somebody, if they're  a famous athlete or a famous person or whatever, to see if you can find an interview with them where they talk about how they set themselves up in the morning, what they do for their morning routine, how they make time for themselves and intention setting. And I bet you you'll find a lot of really awesome information and a lot of really cool things you can maybe incorporate in your morning too. So get in that 3M formula, make it work, and find a way to fit it in. No matter what season of your life you're in, no matter if you're at home in your comfort zone or if you're traveling, you can always find a way to make time for you in the morning. 

[00:11:35] Lunden Souza 

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Self, Love and Sweat, the podcast. Hey, do me a favor. Wherever you're listening to this podcast, give us a review. This really helps a lot and share this with a friend. I'm only one person and with your help we can really spread the message of self love and sweat and change more lives all around the world. I'm Lunden Souza, reminding you that you deserve a life full of passion, presence and purpose fueled by self, love and sweat. This podcast is a Hitspot Austria production.