1. ASSESS YOur Current Morning Routine

Take 3 minutes to jot down how your morning usually happens. This is for your eyes only. Be honest with yourself. Do you get up when your alarm goes off? How do you feel? What do you generally do first? Check your phone? Turn on the news? Jump in the shower? Make coffee? Describe your morning routine exactly as it typically now now in as much detail as you can because we’ll use the detail to help us create a new habit.

2. Brainstorm an ideal morning routine

Take a few moments and design an ideal morning routine: one that sets you up for your intended way of being for the day… perhaps: peaceful, powerful, and joyful.

1. What’s Your Intention? – set it the night before

2. Pick practices that enhance: body, spirit, mind. Practice Options:

   1. Silence

   2. Affirmation

   3. Visualization

   4. Meditation

   5. Exercise

   6. Reading

   7. Journaling

   8. Planning

   9. Connecting with Others

3. Determine your cornerstone morning routine habit from which your entire morning routine will be anchored AND begin

1. Determine the old behavior you want to replace that is unhelpful and sends you in the wrong direction. E.g., picking up your phone to read email or social media leading to a stress cocktail. E.g., not getting up / snoozing leading to rushing.

2. Identify that unhelpful behavior’s trigger: the stimulus that immediately precedes it… the behavior’s “cause”. E.g., waking up and reaching for an object on the night-table. E.g., grabbing alarm clock /phone and hitting snooze.

3. Decide on a new behavior that is 60 seconds or less to complete, that you commit to do, when experiencing the trigger. E.g., picking up your journal. E.g., putting feet on the floor or walking across room to turn off alarm.

4. 3 Breaths Micro-practice

This is something that you can do in just three breaths– to refresh, to be more present, to get off of autopilot, to make a choice about what to do next.

1. First breath: complete yet gentle attention to the process of breathing.

2. Second breath: let the body relax

3. Third breath: ask, what’s most important now?

Suggested applications:

• Before an important conversation

• When you feel triggered by something someone says

• When you get cut off driving on the highway

• Before you transition from being at work to being home

• When you have the urge to check your phone or social media

5. Focused Attention meditation

Distraction is not a bug, it’s a feature. Let’s use our natural mind-wandering to practice bringing back our attention to our breath.

This is how we develop attention and meta-attention.

Start by creating an intention, a reason for wanting to be mindful (reduce stress, increase wellbeing, cultivate emotional intelligence, show up at my best for others, create conditions for world peace…). 

The act of creating good intentions is itself a form of meditation. Every time you create an intention, you are subtly forming or reinforcing a mental habit. 

6. Open awareness meditation

Sometimes the problem isn’t that we’re unfocused. Often what makes it hard for us to feel present is that we’re stuck on something. Our attention is “hooked” by a strong emotion or thought, and we find ourselves preoccupied with it.

For this, a valuable practice complementary to focused attention is called “open awareness.” With open awareness, we practice being aware of thoughts and emotions without getting hooked by them. 

Consider the metaphor of standing on a train platform. Your capacity to observe is like you standing on the platform. A “train” then comes by– like a thought or emotion– and next thing we know, several seconds or minutes passed by because we got totally carried away by that “train of thought.” As a result, we may have lost awareness of our minds, bodies, and people & environment around us. Open Awareness is like remembering to stay on the platform. We observe the trains of thoughts and emotions come and go, but don’t get “hooked” by them and carried away. 

7. Noting Micropractice

This is the micropractice version of open awareness which you can use in any moment that you feel yourself getting stuck on thoughts or emotions.

A slogan or phrase to use in the moment:

“Notice to name it, let it be and just breathe.”

When we get stuck on a thought or emotion, sometimes the best thing we can do is notice, name it or identify what it is, let it be and not continue to ruminate on it, and just breathe. Thoughts and emotions tend to “self-liberate” in this process.

8. Recommitting when you fail to meet your commitment: ACER

This practice is meant to help us build awareness, self-compassion, an acceptance of “failure” or “missing the mark” while INCREASING our performance… meaning, on average, if we utilize ACER, we will keep more commitments to ourselves, on average, overtime.

ACER or S-ACER-S

(0) Self-compassion pledge: No blame, no shame, no guilt, no pain.

(1) ACKNOWLEDGE you didn’t complete the commitment. E.g., “I acknowledge I didn’t move today as I committed.”

(2) CONSEQUENCES — State the consequences of failing to meet your commitment. (It always includes damage to your trust with yourself.) There are usually other natural consequences. Think about the consequences. Name them. E.g., “The consequences are that I lost trust in myself for not completing my commitment and that I don’t feel as relaxed as I do after moving.”

(3) EXAMINE what got in the way. This is ALWAYS introspection and about behavior in your control. Never blame the circumstances. Circumstances are neutral. How your respond to them is your choice. What gets in your way is your beliefs and/or your habits. E.g., “What got in the way is my belief that I feel so crappy it doesn’t matter if I move tonight or not. I know this belief is unhelpful and I’m committed to letting it go.”

(4) RECOMMIT. E.g., “I recommit to moving tomorrow.”

(5) Self-compassion pledge: No blame, no shame, no guilt, no pain.

9. Body scan

Body Scan turns attention to the physiological experience of the body and emotions, and therefore build higher-resolution emotional awareness. 

The body scan is a meditation that allows us to practice two skills: developing higher-resolution awareness of emotions, and witnessing emotions not as the whole “existential” story of who I am in that moment, but as “experiences.”

Body sensations could be pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. In any case, the practice is to meet all body sensations, or lack of them, with openness and kindness.

1o. Journaling

Now we’ll build on Self-Awareness through a second exercise that helps us explore our emotional patterns and tendencies: Journaling. 

Usually, when we write, we're trying to communicate a thought with another person. This exercise is different. You're not trying to communicate with somebody else. Instead, the purpose of this exercise is to help your mind invite and encourage your thoughts to flow, by letting thoughts flow onto paper. You're just opening up a channel and seeing what comes up.

You're writing to yourself, for yourself, you will never have to show this to another person unless you want to.  Hence, you can do this with full honesty.

If you wish, you may discuss or share with your accountability buddy, what are the insights that arose.

Suggested applications:

• Journaling at the start of the day to collect your thoughts, set an intention or goals for the day

• Journaling at the end of a day to do a brain-dump, help to get things off your mind

• Journaling regularly about a challenge or growth area you’re working with

• Having members of a team all do journaling to reflect on team values or on challenges the team is going through

11. Handling Triggers: SBNRR

To practice self-management, we’ll focus on how to respond to triggers–situations that bring up a strong emotion that compel us to act in a certain way.

Amygdala Hijack concept

When you are faced with an experience that creates fear or high levels of stress, an emotional reaction can take over. Daniel Goleman, the Emotional Intelligence expert, called this the “amygdala hijack,” named after the amygdala, that key structure in the brain’s emotional center.

When we detect what looks like a threat to your survival, such as a saber-toothed tiger charging at you–or even a perceived threat like your boss slighting you, it puts you in a fight-flight-freeze mode, decreasing activation in the prefrontal cortex, and therefore impairing rational thinking and decision-making.

To work with triggers, we can do a practice called the SBNRR. It stands for Stop, Breathe, Notice, Reflect, Respond. If you want help remembering that acronym try: “SomeBody Needs R & R” (Rest & Relaxation)!

12. Handling Longer-lasting Uncomfortable Emotions like Self-Doubt, Disappointment, Regret, Embarrassment… ACCEPTANCE

A form of acceptance practice is called “self-compassion.” Dr. Kristin Neff, one of the leading researcher on self-compassion, defines it as having three components: 

• Mindfulness: being aware of but not "over-identified" with mental or emotional phenomena, I am not my thoughts. I am not my feelings.

• Common humanity: recognizing that suffering and personal failure is part of the shared human experience–not just that “there’s something wrong with me.”

• Self-kindness: meeting oneself with warmth, rather than self-criticism or neglect.

A Letter of Self-Compassion is an exercise by Kristin Neff to guide you toward self-compassion.

13. Acceptance Micropractice

This ‘micropractice’ is a portable version of the self-compassion practice, which you can do whenever you feel distressed throughout the day. You can do it “in stealth,” even in the middle of a conversation. It’s a phrase to repeat while breathing in and breathing out:

“Breathing in, I do my best; breathing out, I let go of the rest.”

Say the words on the in breath and out breath, and importantly, see what it’s like to feel the feeling behind the words.

Application Suggestions:

• After a challenging interaction with someone

• When you feel overwhelmed

14. Resilience

To help overcome the inevitable obstacles that come our way, we build equanimity (emotional resilience) and become aware of our explanatory style (cognitive resilience). 

These will then support us to explore ways to transform any places around the setback where we feel stuck.

The way we're going to do this is to generate thoughts relating to "failure" or setbacks, and then thoughts relating to "success." We’ll explore how they feel physiologically and the types of thoughts that come to mind with each.  

The intent is to explore how we can work skillfully with the thoughts and emotions that arise with setbacks.

17. Self Compassion Scale

In which areas of self-compassion are your strongest? In which do you get to practice more?

18. Yin & Yang Self Compassion

There is another side of self-compassion which is FIERCE... More masculine or we can consider it Yang, in the traditional Chinese philosophy. An example of yin self-compassion for a woman who is experiencing burnout at work would be drawing a hot bath and playing relaxing music at the end of the working day. Yang self-compassion, is fierce self-compassion, self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness manifest as stepping up and protecting oneself, standing with others who have experienced similar disharmony, and in clearly seeing the truth. In this way, yang self-compassion shows up as fierce, inner strength (Neff & Germer, 2018). An example of yang self-compassion for the woman experiencing burnout at work would be speaking up to her boss about taking some time off or cutting down her current workload.

First, while self-compassionate care sometimes takes the form of validating and gently leaning into painful emotions (yin), sometimes it involves a stern “no!” and turning away from danger (yang).

• Second, while self-compassion sometimes involves letting our bodies know everything is okay with warmth and tenderness (yin), sometimes it means figuring out what we need and ensuring we meet those needs (yang).

• Third, whereas sometimes self-compassion requires being willingly open to what is (yin), other times it means we need to step up and make a change (yang).