Transforming Your Life: The Power of Mornings and Setting Intentions

(Apologies for the poor sound this week - skip to next week's if you prefer)

How do you start your day?

Join me in this transformative discussion as we explore setting intentions each morning and how it can drastically change our lives. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Starting Your Day for Gentle Rebellion
• 15:00 Connecting to Yourself in the Morning
• 20:42 Power of Morning Intentions
• 33:12 Choosing Happiness and Freedom in Morning

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Overwhelming's optional podcast where each week, we find ways to gently rebel against the nonsense that overwhelming exhaustion are just the price you pay to have the life you want. Hello, welcome to this week's episode. How do you start your day? Two reasons for this powerful question and an episode all about that question. Firstly, I have found that how I start my day makes a big difference to how my day goes. It might sound obvious, but worth delving into because it is obvious. Why don't we use that more and more? And secondly, how I start my day is a good reflection to me personally of how well I'm gently rebelling, so how well I'm allowing myself to be more and more myself, how well I'm rejecting those easy to get sucked back into patterns of behaviour that worked for me up until they stopped working and I burnt out. So the patterns of behaviour where I fill my head with things to do and then push really hard to get those things done, because I'm the kind of person who can kick ass on things and is capable of very intensely focusing on something to the detriment of my body, my health, my relationships, everything. So how do you start your day? Do you wake up? So this resonates. So I remember when I was in my busiest, crazy career period so my 40s when I was teaching. I would wake up in the morning exhausted, absolutely exhausted, but not necessarily exhausted as in deflated. Very often I'd wake up exhausted, not realising I was exhausted and because I was excited and pushing on through but not realising that I was pushing against myself, because at that point in my life I didn't know what I know now about pushing on through, meaning that I was not listening to my body and I didn't understand the harm I was doing to myself. I didn't understand there was a better way to live, because you don't know what you don't know right. So in those days I was spending a lot of time in my head and that would start from the moment I woke up. In fact, often it would start in the middle of the night. I'm sure you can resonate, but that's very common, isn't it? For those of us who are very busy, very driven ideas. People get excited about life, want to fall life.

Speaker 1: 2:37

Very often, I think, we wake up in the night and there's a lot of worrying going on, and I didn't always mind that because I got some of my best thinking done in the night. Sometimes I'd wake up and I'd write loads of ideas out, I'd kick projects off. All sorts of stuff would happen. But actually in general it was a bit rubbish, because I need sleep, I like sleep, I'm a big fan of sleep. Sleep is good for me. I'd rather sleep through the night. So that wasn't helpful when. That used to happen a lot. I don't mind occasionally if it happens now, because normally there's some really good ideas, but also I've learnt to just accept that that might happen sometimes and that I've decided that's not going to impact my day.

Speaker 1: 3:16

Whereas when I was living right on that edge what I call surfing the verge of burnout not getting good night's sleep really meant I felt like I was teetering more towards the emotional outburst, although I was very good at crushing that at work right until the end and was rubbish at crushing that at home, which meant that my partner would get the worst at me, and that's not really what I want. That's not. That's so out of alignment, isn't it? You wait a long time, you know. You kiss a lot of frogs and then you meet the man of your dreams and then you shout at him when you have a successful career not quite the life I intended to live.

Speaker 1: 4:03

So in those days when I was what I thought was riding high on success and in many ways I was, and I'm not going to take that away from myself I loved, loved, loved, loved what I was doing. I had extraordinary opportunities, I did amazing things. I was really good at what I did. I got a lot of meaning and satisfaction from it. I was well paid, blah, blah, blah. But I was also killing myself and when I used to.

Speaker 1: 4:29

But I didn't know that. Obviously I didn't know that it's easy to look back, isn't it go? Why would you do that? Why would you do that? Heidi, that's bulkers, it's easy to look back and do that didn't have the kind of wisdom and knowledge I have now. Certainly didn't have the skills, despite having lots of knowledge. So knowledge, as in academic knowledge Anyway, see if you can relate to this.

Speaker 1: 4:51

You wake up in the morning and before you've even properly come to your mind is full, absolutely chock a block, and it's already because the mind can move faster than the body, it's already out the room. So you haven't even come to stretched, woken up, realised what day it is and your mind is already halfway through your day, somewhere on the other side of the planet, having rehearsing conversations with people, or it might be time travelling, going over an old conversation that's still bugging you. Oh man, all of those things at once, because I don't know about you, but it's times when I think my mind is like several minds and it can just run parallel programmes of rehearsal of past, future. What's going on, plus keeping I don't know how many different lists going on which I was completely unaware of until I start, until I had my burnout time, and then I had to rebuild myself and through my work with clients and the deep work I've done on myself, I uncovered these things. So that was pretty much how I used to wake up in the morning and then at weekends that was still going on, but then I'd realised, oh, thank goodness, it's Saturday, and then just sink back into the bed feeling very heavy, that concreteness, that, like the body's so tired, even though I would have not done exercise you know, not done things being outside enough, or done a lot of movement, I wouldn't necessarily have been sitting. I would have been sitting, walking and standing during the day, but not doing the things that my body really needed to do and enjoys doing to feel happy, nourished, well, supple, strong, etc. Even though I wasn't doing a lot of movement. Oh man, the exhaustion was just ridiculous.

Speaker 1: 6:51

Then, as I started to do this work and really look at what was going on, I started to really look at what I was doing first thing in the morning. So if you've heard me talk about this, before the first day, when I should have been at work and I found myself at home, I had intended to get up, do an hour of yoga and an hour of meditation. That was my dream. I just wanted that feeling back of when I'd done my intensive yoga teacher training and felt good, felt connected to myself, had lots of energy, felt really well, felt very centered, felt very aligned. I wanted that back and I thought the way to get that was to have this very, very strict Zen routine, and Zen routines are very, very strict. I mean to the point of punishing your body, to the point of sitting there even though your knees are screaming at you, your back screaming at you, your neck screaming at you. Everything's gone numb, like there's really strict routines within.

Speaker 1: 8:01

From what I've experienced I'm no Zen expert, but my experience was that discipline and I liked that discipline because you have to think. If you've got a structure that you can just follow blindly, you don't have to think. But my problem is that doesn't work for me, and actually one of the things I like about Zen is it's not supposed to. You are supposed to rebel against it and find your own way really, really important. And that morning, when I woke up in the dark ready to do what I thought was my dream routine now I had time and I rolled out my yoga mat and I lay down in the dark and I was so heavy and exhausted I realized, as I tuned in and listened to my body, that this was not the routine that was going to help me heal and I got back into bed.

Speaker 1: 8:58

So over time I did develop routines that worked for me and I tried lots and lots of different things. I tried the formal sitting meditation. I tried some chigong, because that's a gentler way than a strict yoga routine and also I quite like that. I like I don't know there's something about chigong I really really like and also Zen yoga is very, very close to chigong and there's lots of overlap. So that's not really doing something differently, but there's a particular chigong routine that I really really like and that would sometimes work, and then other times I'd be rebelling against it.

Speaker 1: 9:39

And what I found is, every time that I come up with a very strict routine to support myself in this gentle rebellion, to support my mind, so that I can think clearly, I can let go of anxiety and pressure, so that I can just reject overwhelm, reject pressure, reject stress, reject restrictions that stop me being myself, things that deplete me. Every time I come up with a strict routine and I get really excited, because I'm that kind of person. I get intense and go yes, this is it, I'm going to go all in on this. After a while I start rebelling against it and then I start beating myself up, thinking we haven't done it. Now, what's wrong with you? And then I remember I'm not supposed to. What I'm supposed to do is do it my way, and then I rebel against it. Now that's very difficult, isn't it? Because it's easy to get into the judgmental when you've said you do it and now you're not doing it, and then you can have a fight with yourself and you know, you can sit on your shoulder and say you're rubbish, you're just weak, why are you not doing this? Or you can look at it seriously.

Speaker 1: 10:50

So to me it starts with the commitment. So when in my group coaching program, get your life back, the morning promise is the tiny, huge life changing practice which, throughout it, every single day for 12 weeks, you're invited to do as a strict structure. On the morning promises there's a whole episode on this somewhere I commit to myself first to living my life my way, and it's an embodied practice, so it's not just a saying it to get it done and out of the way so you can then rebel against it and not really discover ways of living your life your way. It's to set that clear intention for those 12 weeks while you're learning to get your life back by tuning into your body, listening to your heart, nourishing your mind, committing to living your life your way. But the point of it is to make it your own, is to make it part of your body, to completely embody it, to really listen into your body, tune into your heart, set an intention.

Speaker 1: 11:53

It's not about the routine, and I think that's the key here. It's about how you're doing something. So if I think about, there's lots and lots of morning routines shared online for free, very generously, from highly successful people who are sharing what works for them. I've tried lots of them or bits of them, and I really struggle with somebody else's routine, quite rightly. Welcome to the gender rebellion, where you tune in to doing things your way. But it can be really helpful to take somebody else's routine, try it out, reject what doesn't work for you and take the bits that do. That might not be allowed in some of those routines, I don't know. I haven't looked at them all, but that's what the gender rebellion is about.

Speaker 1: 12:45

It's about tuning in and saying what really resonates with me, what works for me and also what works to make this point. So if you're a really, really busy period in your life and you're completely overwhelmed, tuning up an hour earlier to do some very long, structured routine, is that going to work for you? I don't know. It might do. It didn't work for me and it was really important for me. That moment of listening. What do I need now? What's going to nourish me right now? Because actually it's the listening that matters, it's the tuning inwards, it's the letting go of the pressures and external clutter of you ought to be doing this. You should have this strict routine. If only you did this every morning, everything would magically be okay. It's not true. It's the intention, it's.

Speaker 1: 13:38

What I like about the morning promise is that it's very small, obviously because it's a tiny, huge, life-changing practice. It's the smallest thing to do in the morning with the biggest impact, and it is a strict structure. But it's designed for you to make it yours and this is really important, and some members of Get your Life Back have fought against it, struggled against it, not quite managed to make it theirs for a very long time. And that's okay, because it's not just the doing of the practice, it's the exploring, it's the discovery, it's the oh. What is it about this that I don't like? What is it about this I do like? How well am I committing to it? Am I forgetting to do it because I don't want to do it? Or am I forgetting to do it because I don't really like it? Or it's not working for me, or there is something there for me, but I'm resisting it because it's connecting to my heart and I'm not ready to listen to what my heart wants, because I'm scared that this will create listening to my heart will create some huge wild disruption in my life. There's so much within that, but what I really really like about the warning promise is because it's so tiny, because it doesn't take long to say, it doesn't require a huge disruption, so you can always fit it in Now.

Speaker 1: 15:00

Not only manages to in very busy times, and it's it it does. That doesn't matter either. What matters to me is that we have something that connects us to ourselves in the morning and allows us to centre into ourselves, to take our attention back, because that's the thing, isn't it? That waking up in the morning and your attention already being on external things. That's, to me, is the problem, because that's the disconnect, that's the not starting the day connected to yourself. So that's disempowering, because if you want, if you want it all, you want vibrant health. So listening to the body is absolutely vital, because the body has the wisdom. The body is a natural healing machine. Listening to it matters.

Speaker 1: 15:51

If you're not connecting to your heart, well, it's really really hard to allow it to guide you to doing the things that matter most to you, and it's very, very easy then to get caught up in the mind, and the mind without the anchoring of the body and the heart does tend to get swept up into overwhelm and like coasting along in a storm, like some tumbleweed and we think, oh, I'm getting stuff done, so I must be achieving things and this must result in me feeling more easy and more at home and happier. When this is done, then that's the mind thinking, isn't it? When I've got to the end of this to-do list, then I feel at ease. It's a track of the mind to get caught up in that, in the chaos, the madness, and sometimes it's exciting and it can be very satisfying, can't it You're? I know I've done that when I've been super busy and then I just kick ass on stuff. It's like it is very satisfying.

Speaker 1: 16:49

But for me it's no way to live anymore. It's not enough. It's not enough to kick ass at work and then come home and be exhausted and not really have the time, the energy, the space, the headspace to just let go and be fully present in the rest of my life. I want it. Oh, it's not enough for me. It seemed like it was at one point that seemed to be the deal. If I could kick ass at work, that was enough, turned out I was wrong, but at the time there was a lot of satisfaction in that and I'm grateful for that time because it's taught me. It's taught me what matters to me, and I love, love, love now kicking ass at work and then switching off.

Speaker 1: 17:34

And this week I've noticed that I've been really playing with doing that more times during the day, which I don't normally do to such an extent. So normally I focus on some work and then every now and again I just need to go and move and bounce around. Or if I'm doing a lot of creative work, it can be really helpful to do something like weeding or cleaning or something that doesn't require my mind, because that allows the creative process to happen. So I will take breaks. But this week I've really noticed, because my intention this month is to bring the freedom I felt on holiday into my day to day life I've been deliberately doing very focused, intense stuff, and by intense I mean like completely being completely present in doing mainly outside things, particularly yesterday because it was sunny all day, which we haven't had for a while.

Speaker 1: 18:34

We've had a lot of rain, so it felt wrong to be inside, and then it really took me back to that time when I was really struggling with my career and I had a classroom overlooking cherry trees, because for one month or a few weeks, depending on the wind at the time there was this beautiful blossom, but I couldn't really go outside. There wasn't really anywhere to be outside, and that used to really bug me than not being able to just go outside for a bit, so that when it was sunny I just wanted to be outside. And then I start longing to be at home, longing not to be at work so I could be outside. And then I thought about this and thought how often do I go outside when it's sunny during my working days? Now I'm running my own business and I do pop out, but I really liked this idea of no, I'm going to go outside until my next online meeting, and that's not. It doesn't sound like much, but it was really switching it and making it into. I'm seeing it now like a stripy day, so like intense focus on something at work and then intense focus on something at home. And I just wanted to try that and see how well I could move from work focus to home focus and back again like a bouncing around. And I know not everybody can do that, because if you're in a corporate job that's not really going to be possible, but I'm not. And the insecurity of being an entrepreneur Surely part of that is to shake this up even more than I've done up until now. So that's why I was playing with particularly yes, so, when the sunshine was was out, and I really liked that. So I'm going to be playing with that a bit more. Anyway, back to mornings how you're waking up in the morning. So where are you on your on your journey? So you might have just joined us on the podcast and the gentle rebellion welcome.

Speaker 1: 20:42

Overwhelming is definitely optional, but it does require the decision to make it optional. So the belief that it's possible for you for it to be optional, and then Practices that enable you to make it optional, which means looking after the mind and connecting to the heart and the body and moving from mind, base living to mind, body, heart, and One of the ways is to really think about how you wake up in the morning. Now I would argue it's enough to just notice, and I feel like I need to say this more, but sometimes I don't. So I remember one of the reviews on my book says something along the lines of like, read it really fast. It's not designed to be read fast, but it doesn't matter. But. And then looking for the like, the answer. So what's the tool, what's the thing that's gonna help me? And then going was that it?

Speaker 1: 21:37

And then rereading and realizing and I can't emphasize this enough there is huge power in neutral noticing, just noticing, completely Nutrally, what's going on for you at any given moment. This is enormous. It expands your mind to all of the bits of information that you need that you didn't know were there. It and the act of doing it creates space in your body, in your head, in your heart, in your Life, in your day. It expands time, just pausing, noticing, completely Nutrally. Feel your feet on the ground. Use the one minute mark if you want it, the links in the show notes underneath. Neutral noticing makes a huge difference.

Speaker 1: 22:23

So I would argue it's enough to wake up in the morning and notice. Notice where your mind's going, because then you know where you are and we can only start where we are. We don't tend to start where we are. We start where we think we ought to be or we think we're behind, because we're judging ourselves. But we, to get really clear on where you are, notice what's going on for me at this moment. How overwhelmed are you, how full is your head when you wake up in the morning. Now, this episode is not designed to give you a morning routine. There's lots of those online. There's a whole episode on the morning promise. If you want to just take a moment at the beginning of your day, so gently rebelling, to commit to yourself first, this episode is just designed to get you to think about how you're starting your day, because that, I believe, is really really powerful.

Speaker 1: 23:18

So where I've moved to now, so I spent, I've spent the last I don't know how many years. It's difficult to put a beginning to a gentle rebellion because it kind of pounced on me and I realized that's what I was doing. But in terms of Searching for a way I was like to be myself, to have it all, to feel well and have meaningful, satisfying work. I was doing that all the way through, probably most of my life, but particularly in my career when I realized it really wasn't working for me. I did put a lot of effort into trying to make it work for me, but it didn't work until I learned to get out of my head and to connect to my body and my heart. That's what switched it for me majorly and that definitely came about from choosing, rejecting the idea of doing and masters and applied positive psychology and instead Choosing to retrain as a Zen yoga teacher. That was a deliberate thing to get out of my head, which is five years ago. So Now, how do I wake up? So what I've really, really noticed in the last month is this Before I went on holiday, I set it as an intention that I would have an amazing holiday and give myself permission to have proper time off.

Speaker 1: 24:47

And setting that intention as a project actually one of my priority projects for July completely changed my experience of my road trip, because it was intentional. An intention, to me, is very, very powerful. I'm finding that I'm using it more and more and more. So I always set it and increasingly set it before a coaching session, before recording a podcast episode, before writing a blog, before sending an email, before having an online meeting. Setting an intention pulls my attention back to me and makes me think about what I really want, and then I up level it. So I'm always going for the greatest possible intention, which is why I sometimes make it open with a kind of or even better or more than I could possibly imagine. So like for a client it would be. I intend for this session to be such an incredible session for this client, that they get way more than they could ever possibly have imagined, and that I find very, very powerful. I think there's something there in controlling the attention and I can hear my mind going yes, but you're just tricking yourself, heidi. So, for example, yesterday I had two calls with people who want to be in my podcast and I set intentions for the calls and in both cases, exactly the intention that I set which was about the energy between us and how it felt and what it will then create and it exactly and I really really mean this exactly the intention I set was the energy that we felt together during that call. So that's really really powerful. Really powerful.

Speaker 1: 26:52

But is it a trick? Kind of. But does it matter? So if you can trick yourself into being happier and healthier, that's okay, right, because you're happier and healthier. It's ridiculous when our minds do this, but it's not real, it's a trick. Well, we live through our minds primarily. So if we can trick the mind into feeling at ease and feeling happier, that's going to be a good thing, right? So, when you set an intention, if you set an intention for your day and then that's going to draw your attention to the fact that that's actually what you want, and then you're going to look for evidence of that being true and then, when you get to the end of the day, you're going to be grateful that that intention came true. Yes, it's kind of a trick because you're moving your attention into noticing the absolute best for yourself, but it works. I find it works anyway.

Speaker 1: 27:47

So what I was doing before I went on my road trip was imagining that. Imagine it being easy, the feeling of freedom, the idea of not booking accommodation or having a strict itinerary, feeling really, really good, really empowering, really freeing, as opposed to being something to cope with. So I completely turned upside down as a genuine practice of freedom and it worked brilliantly and I had. Honestly, it's one of the best holidays I've ever had. The feeling of freedom was incredible and what I noticed was that I was waking up just really, really grateful and I was remembering that intention which was embodied to thoroughly enjoy my time away, to thoroughly enjoy my time with my son, to thoroughly enjoy being in all these different places, having the freedom to be in a car and just travel to these beautiful places, to look for the friendliness of people, to expect to find the best coffee in it to be delicious. To expect the weather as well. I did have huge expectations of the weather and everywhere we went it was sunny, apart from the first day. So that worked.

Speaker 1: 29:05

That setting of intention first thing in the morning and then looking for evidence of that being true, and then being grateful that it was true, and doing that repetitively, because what I've decided is no matter what happens, I'm going to be happy. I'm done. I've had a lot of stuff happen to me in my life that has broken my heart and I'm done with that. I'm done with waiting for something to happen that makes everything okay, for somebody else's behaviour to change towards me so that I can be happy. I'm done with that. I'm choosing to be happy, and before I thought, yeah, that's an easy thing to say, but there's been times in my life when that would have felt impossible. But actually, the more I've practised it in really tiny ways, the more powerful I find it, and I'm just assuming this is going to keep going, because I have to assume that, don't I? Because I'm having the intention for that to be true.

Speaker 1: 30:07

So at the moment that's working really, really well for me, but it wasn't a sudden thing, so I can see that all of the neutral noticing I've done, all of the commitment to myself, all of the deliberately controlling my attention onto unexpectedly lovely things, onto being grateful, into feeling safe, into feeling free, into accepting myself, all of the messy journaling I've done, looking at what caused me to implode my life by burning out and losing myself, what caused that to happen. That was a lot of courage to go back and look. Why on earth would that happen to me? I knew what I was doing, what's wrong with me, that that would happen. How embarrassing to face the shame of imploding my life. There's power in that, there's freedom in that.

Speaker 1: 31:00

So everything that I've done, particularly in the last five years, culminated in this waking up in the morning and noticing how free I feel, how free of overwhelm and pressure I now allow myself to be. I do think it's an allowing, it's a letting go, it's a letting stuff be. I have done this, I've done enough. I refuse to do more because that would be crossing boundaries to do with work, life, balance and energy and health. I let go, I trust. So there was the wrapping up of my business and trusting.

Speaker 1: 31:47

And then there was the commitment of feeling free, expecting sunshine, expecting beautiful views, expecting to get unwell with my son, expecting the car to run well, all of the expecting every bit of accommodation that we booked at the last minute to be comfortable, clean, with a lovely bed, a nice dark room to sleep in silence, hot showers, friendly people all of those things just have. Holding those expectations and looking for that and deliberately focusing on everything good about me and holding that every morning first thing that worked. That's what I've noticed. That's what's changed for me how I wake up in the morning and that deliberate controlling my attention, noticing when my mind is swept up in all of the things I need to do, all of the incompleted things from the day before, and pulling my attention back to myself and deciding that today I choose to feel free and happy and at ease in my life and excited about what I'm doing today. Looking forward to what I'm doing today or, if it's a difficult day, deciding that despite the difficulties, I still choose myself first. I still choose happiness.

Speaker 1: 33:12

That is a really strong way to wake up in the morning and it was really highlighted to me on holiday how well all of the work I've done on my gentry rebellion to get to this point is working. So I invite you not to come up with a really strict routine for your morning that then you can beat yourself up about when it fails. I just invite you to notice, completely neutrally, how you're waking up in the morning and where your attention is going and, from that point, deciding if you want more freedom, more ease, more happiness. To choose that with an intention to pull your attention back to yourself, to notice how you are, to just pause for a few seconds and choose happiness, choose freedom, resist the overwhelm. Have a great week. Thank you so much for being part of this podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please do take a little moment of your time to share it, like it, etc. To help other people find it, and if you'd like to know more about my work, please go to wwwtidymarkcouk.