This is a follow up to my Morning Ritual – Start Your Day Productive.  While getting up in the morning and jumping into my morning ritual right away can be a bit challenging, I’m really enjoying the experience.

I find that when I first wake up, I have the tendency to get distracted.  Whether I want to check my email, reply to some text messages on my phone or read the news.  These are many of the way I used to start my day in the past.

However once I push myself to get going on my morning ritual, and especially start the physical activity portion of it, the rest takes care of itself.

I’m also finding that it’s a bit easier with some preparation the night before.  If you are planning on taking a walk in the morning, it will help tremendously if you prepare the night before.  Lay out your walking clothing and shoes.  Maybe find your water bottle, and your music player.  This way when you first wake up, everything you need to start your morning ritual is right there and you have no excuse to skip out on it or be distracted.

Some Benefits of the Morning Ritual:

• Getting your physical activity or exercise out of the way first thing in the morning.  This is probably the biggest benefit.  It sets you up for a healthy active day, leaves you feeling energized and ready to take on whatever comes your way.
• Starting the day in a Positive Mindset.  Doing your physical activity and eating a healthy breakfast as part of your morning ritual gets you in a positive mindset.  If later on in the day negativity or laziness tries to sneak in, you will most probably ignore it.  That positive and healthy momentum that you build in the morning tends to stay with you all day.

Some Morning Ritual Issues to Watch our for:

• Perfectionism.  This will certainly make implementing a morning ritual very difficult.  Things will come up.  Maybe you are planning on doing a morning walk, you wake up and it’s raining heavily outside.  If you are a bit of a perfectionist and get angry about this, you will probably just give up on your morning ritual.  Instead be flexible, do your best, try an alternate psychical activity at home, or even skip the physical activity portion of your morning ritual for that day.  Alternate physical activities could include cleaning your house, doing sit-ups, doing push-ups and so on.
• Waking Up Earlier.  You might have to wake up a little earlier than usual to do your morning ritual.  Waking up earlier can be tough.  An easy way to do it is to wake up earlier slowly and gradually.  Maybe wake up 15 minutes earlier everyday this week.  And then next week wake up 30 minutes earlier, and so on.