Unlocking the Potential of Morning Routines: Insights from 'The 5 AM Club' and 'The Miracle Morning'

Awaken to the transformative power of morning routines with our latest episode, where we dissect the pivotal hours before dawn through the lens of "The 5 AM Club" by Robin Sharma and "The Miracle Morning" by Hal Elrod. My morning evolution serves as a testament to the remarkable benefits these practices offer, reshaping my daily agenda and my entire perspective on success. Journey with me as we delve into the art of customizing the ideal start to your day, gaining practical insights on how to supercharge your well-being and creativity before your first cup of coffee.

Don your headphones and prepare to elevate your life's trajectory as we juxtapose two revered guides on seizing the day. Whether you favor a story-driven approach or a straightforward manual, we sift through the nuances that distinguish "The 5 AM Club's" philosophy of leadership from "The Miracle Morning's" blueprint for transformation. From tweaking the famed 20-20-20 routine to favor your unique rhythm to choosing the right activities for your sunrise session, this episode is an empowering call to craft your version of a morning that leads to a productive and enriched life. Join me and take that first early flight toward a future brimming with potential.

Enter a world of fear, resilience, and generational trauma in "The Devil That Haunts Me". Follow Isabella and Julitza as they confront their demons in a tale of suspense, mystery, and the supernatural.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to this new season of have a Cup of Joani podcast. In this season, we are embarking on an exciting journey, one of shameless learning. We're tossing out the fear of judgment and embracing curiosity with open arms, whether it's exploring new ideas, tackling challenging topics or learning from our missteps. We're doing it all without shame or inhibition. Can't wait for y'all to listen to this, hello everyone. So we have talked about habits, we have talked about goal setting, we have talked about grit, and now for our last episode, in January, where we are discussing all these productivity tips to transform our lives, we are going to talk about the last two books that I have been mentioning throughout these episodes but haven't really talked about with you all, and they are the 5am Club by Robin Sharma and the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. I'm a morning person, you know, so are you ready? Let's begin. I listened to the Miracle Morning while I was driving from El Paso to Kentucky, and I found it to be very similar to the 5am Club. I literally looked at my phone and I was like is this the 5am Club? Did I just started listening to the 5am Club, you know? Did I click the wrong book by mistake? And I found that I did not. Nevertheless, these two books, they tackle the same theme, which is how can one exploit their mornings to set up their day and to really set up their lives? And this, for me, goes back to habit forming. What these two authors are challenging their readers with is to build this kind of this schedule, these habits that you tackle first thing in the morning, every morning, so that way you can accomplish the big things in life. So both books discuss the transformative power of morning routines to improve our personal and professional success, and some of the key takeaways that both of them have is that they advocate for waking up early, specifically 5 am. So, like you heard me saying, usually on vacation I do wake up at 5 am without an alarm, but when I am at work, after I'm done with vacation, my wake-up time is four in the morning and I have to ease myself into that one. But for me, I have to pull it back to four in the morning because that gives me a clear hour to tackle my morning routine. And if you heard me on the previous episode, you know that I have my habit tracker. I finished my 2024 bullet journal review, my 2023 bullet journal, and I am ready to tackle 2024 now, and I do have my morning routine. That I do. And this morning routine came about before I read the 5 am club. After reading 5 am club, I tweaked it a little bit, I modified it and after reading the Miracle Morning, I just implemented one change in it. Nevertheless, let me tell you what those are. I am going into my handy dandy 2024 bullet journal. Hmm, all right.

Speaker 1: 4:39

So my habit trackers my habit tracker, I'm sorry, are I write three things I'm grateful for in my grateful journal. I take my vitamins, I have a fitness session not tied to my unit I drink eight cups of water, I meditate, I do 10 minutes of growth and I do 20 minutes of writing or writing related things such as editing. That is my routine, people, and I started doing this from modifying the bad habit that I have from picking up my phone first thing in the morning and looking at social media. Now I pick up my phone and go into my clear, full journal to write the three things I'm grateful for. That leads into guided meditation. That leads to learning a little bit from noon on the psychology of eating, and with everything that I read, I put it against my life to see how I can modify it so that way it works for me and it makes my life better, not worse, because at the end of the day, as human beings, we don't want to do things that makes us feel like crap. We want to do things that are easy to do and makes our lives better. So that's why I modify a lot of the things, every single thing, when it comes to self-help, that I re-tailer it to my life and my wants. All right. So some of the other key ideas or key takeaways that are the same.

Speaker 1: 6:24

Like I said, they advocate for rising up early, waking up early at 5 am, and both books testify that this maximizes productivity, creativity and overall well-being, and I can attest to that, that that is very true. I ultimately feel at odds when I miss some part of my morning routine or don't do it. I feel kind of like unbalanced, because the habits that I've cultivated, my morning routine that I've cultivated, everything is in there. Everything found its way, fought to be in that list, because every single one of those things aids in my well-being. That's exactly why they're there. If they didn't make my well-being or made my well-being better, they wouldn't be in there. So another thing that both Sharma and Elrod highlight is the importance of using early morning hours for personal growth activities.

Speaker 1: 7:41

I read somewhere that it's like, when your brain opens up in the morning, that is the best time to tackle tasks that require, like, either creativity or that requires certain kind of focus, because you are fresh, especially for me. I'm a morning person, so I am really fresh, and in the morning I want to say, like 10 or 15 minutes after, after I wake up, I am really fresh. So that's why I have a reading habit in there as well as a writing habit in there, because I'm really gonna be able to digest the, the information that I read. It really is gonna stick with me. I'm gonna be able to think about throughout the day and potentially implement some of the things that I learned there. When it comes to writing, because I'm a morning person, my writing is just is better in the morning than it is in the evening. I have done both early morning writing and evening writing and I have found that early morning I am because I'm in that kind of like just woke up, still kind of my body is still kind of rising that I find myself able to get into flow a whole lot faster in the mornings than in the evening. In the evening, I find my mind to be cluttered with a lot of work related stuff and worries that it is really hard to get into the book. But if time is a constraint, I'm gonna write regardless, because that is my focus. That is my goal for this year, which is to publish the devil that haunts me. Therefore, a writing and needs to be consistent so that way I can achieve that goal.

Speaker 1: 9:47

Another thing that both of these books have is that they have this holistic approach to improvement. They both encompass physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being, so they target the whole person in the, in the routines that they advocate, for All of this, according to these books, sets a positive tone for the rest of the day. They also both have Remember Sabres. They also both have, like this structure, frameworks to go off of, like these, these cute little acronyms or things to kind of like remember. So the 5am club. The author has 2020, which is 20 minutes of exercise, 20 minutes of planning and reflection and 20 minutes of learning or reading. You see 2020, 20, so you remember that and that gives you an hour. And Elrod, on the other hand, he has what he calls Sabres.

Speaker 1: 13:09

My husband I found this really funny when he was talking about that. So the S is for silence, intentional silence, a is affirmations, b is visualization, e is exercise, r is reading and S is for scribing. He said something that made us chuckle while we was listening to it and that is like I had to use scribing, because if I would have put W for writing, that acronym wouldn't have worked. And my husband I just started laughing because the author, elrod, was talking about how he wanted to come up with something that will help the readers remember this routine, and he just wasn't coming up with anything. And he said that he approached his wife and his wife was like we'll turn it into an acronym, go into the thesaurus and see what synonyms are there, so that way you can make it into an acronym. And that's how he came up with scribing, but it is writing, which both mean the same thing, right? So, as you can see, both of these books have these structure frameworks that helps the reader know the routine or know how to implement the routine.

Speaker 1: 14:34

They both have transformational stories and practical advice. When you read Elrod's story, he went through a lot. He went through a lot before he adopted the thesaurus method that he talks about in his book the Miracle Morning, and it really shows you how much grit he had to overcome those obstacles, and not just to overcome it but to make something of it that turned his life around. Pretty good stuff there. The books also target like a wide audience. They're not niche in their audience targeting. They're more like you can do this if you want to improve your life, and that really leaves it super wide for anyone to grab on to these concepts in these books and both of these books, through their examples that they use here, they are saying that these are transformative, these are life changing techniques that will pay life changing dividends in anyone's life looking to see results in their discipline and long term success. So those are the things that these two books have in common and, like I said, I had a morning routine because one I've been a morning person since I was very little.

Speaker 1: 16:13

When my grandma was raising me under Dominican Republic, she used to wake us up to do chores early in the morning. So she kind of instilled in us that habit of waking up to do something productive and I just maintained that and have evolved into what I do in the mornings as I've gotten older and, at the end of the day, like I said, the habits that I have in there they cultivate, they nourish my goals, which is to publish books and to have a great well-being mind, body and soul. So they all contribute to that. Now, these books are not totally the same either, so just because you've read one doesn't necessarily mean you don't have to read the other one. I read both, so I found a few differences in there. I found that the 5 am club is a little bit more philosophical, but I do like their storytelling mode that they use to convey the message. I'm a writer, so I love it when somebody even in nonfiction they implement the storytelling mode to teach someone something, I find it easily digestible and highly entertaining. So I do like that about the 5 am club.

Speaker 1: 17:46

The miracle morning, though, it's different because it doesn't use that tone, that mode of teaching. They're more straightforward and practical. So I would say if you're more like a how-to practical person, do this, do that, do that. Then you may lean more towards the miracle morning, because that's the tone used in this book. They also have different frameworks, right. So one uses 2020, 20 and the other one uses savers. So I have found the 5 am club, the 2020, 20, to not fit into my timeline that I have in the mornings. So, as you can see from what I read right here, the only 20 that I have in there is for writing, because that's the minimum that I want to do when it comes to writing. Everything else is more within a 5 to 10 minute range because I can tackle those things within that range. So I tailor mined away from 2020 to fit my habits and to fit my life and, as you can see, elrods savers it's a little bit of a longer routine. So I don't have any. No, I don't have anything. No, no, I don't have anything from this routine.

Speaker 1: 19:16

But I have incorporated though the reading I was doing. What was I doing before? I was doing more listening to things before, as I was doing other things and I found myself to not really retain any of that information. So when I listened to the miracle morning and the authors talk about reading, then I was like, hmm, maybe that's what I need to do, maybe I need to go back to reading in the traditional sense so that way I am able to retain the information, because I wasn't retaining things. And then I found that my mind was not quiet at that time, so my mind was really busy and loud. So then, having a loud mind and then trying to listen to somebody talk was really not conducive to me retaining any information.

Speaker 1: 20:20

So after reading the Saber's method in the miracle morning, what I have done is I have put a book, I've pulled a book from my bookshelf and put it where I usually sit down for meditation and it's right there for me. So that means that I get to meditate and then I grab the book and read for 10 minutes, all right. Another thing they defer on that is the specific time. I don't follow either one of the times. The 5 am club is very specific about 5 am being the magical time. As you have heard me say, I'm more of a 4 am Magical time person.

Speaker 1: 21:12

The miracle morning is more of a flexible timeline. It just has to be in the morning whenever you get up, and the author talks about his routine, the length of it and how he really divides it into these time boxes throughout the morning. And he talks about how clients as well do the same thing that they either divide it throughout the day depending on their schedule and their lives, or they crunch it all in in the morning. It all really is very flexible, according to what the author is saying, and it truly is either one of these, you can flex it to your life and your schedule.

Speaker 1: 21:59

Another thing that they defer on is that the 5 am club places a significant emphasis on leadership and elite performance, and I think that's what drew me to this book, because I just wanted to see how I can make my professional performance better, and it ended up being that what I learned from there made my personal life better Also the professional, but I was more thinking that it was gonna be more towards the professional. The miracle morning, on the other hand, is more center on personal transformation, kind of like wellbeing and all of that. And then, of course, the last thing that they defer on, like I discussed before, is the dial, the tone of these books. So the 5 am club is more of a narrative style I will put this one more in the creative nonfiction category while the miracle morning is more of a self-help nonfiction tone. So, depending on what you like, read whatever book leans towards your preference.

Speaker 1: 23:15

In summary, while these two books have a lot of things that are the same, the essence of these books are different and that is what really will prompt you to choose one over the other. But I encourage anyone that wants to tackle either their morning or tackle that timeline of when they're most alert and have the most time to fit in their habits that propel them forward, that helps them have positive and productive life personal and professional. I will say that they can read either one of these books, really either one of these books. I think the only thing that really will change your mind to read one over the other will be the tone, which, like I said, the five am is more narrative. The other one, the Miracle Morning, is more how-to, practical kind of book. So I will think that that will be the only thing that will sway a person towards one as opposed to the other.

Speaker 1: 24:29

But nevertheless, these two books have helped me to adjust and modify and make my morning routine a whole lot better and I'm so happy to have read them. And I was so happy to have this morning routine because it really sets my day for success and thinking back of the time where I didn't have a specific morning routine and how chaotic it was, I'm like, oh, I wish I would have had something then. But better late than never, right? All right, folks, we have found ourselves at the end of this episode. It is the end of January.

Speaker 1: 25:19

I hope that you have learned something from either this episode or any of the other episodes. Please take what you learned to make your life better. Take what you learned to make it work for you, not against you, and I hope to see you next Wednesday. Okay, bye, we can, we can fly. We can, we can fly. Thank you so much for listening. I want to hear from you. Leave me a comment, do a rating if you can on the podcast, share it with somebody you love, but, most importantly, come back. See you next time. Bye, let's go. Come on, we can, we can fly, we can fly.