I recently had a real heart-to-heart with one of my closest friends.

I set big goals for the year and I’m not on track for them…. He knows it and he knows how much I want it so he called me out on my shit because that’s what a great friend does.

If you have a bunch of people around you who never call you out when you’re slacking, those aren’t your friends… and if you get defensive when people call you out when you KNOW that you’ve been slacking, you don’t want to achieve your goals as much as you say you do.

That conversation lit a fire under me.

Not just because I realized I was slacking but because he reminded me how much he counted on me to achieve MY goals so that he could achieve HIS goals.

That’s how accountability works… We all succeed together.

That’s coopertition for you (coopertition is competitive cooperation — we are super supportive of each other and it’s still a competition for who’s going to be the best) or the popular term all over the internet is community over competition.

As I was falling asleep last night, I gave myself a hype talk…

It was sort of like Mufasa talking to Simba from the sky in the Lion King (don’t judge me).

I reminded myself that we don’t adjust our goals, we adjust our activities… That means I needed to 10x everything that I’m doing

The year is flying by… and waiting till Q3 isn’t going to get us to achieve our goals.

During that self hype-talk, I remembered someone telling me sometime, somewhere (yea seriously, I don’t even remember who told me this but it’s great advice)…

If you want to do more in a day, wake up earlier.

If you want to do more in a day, wake up earlier. Click To Tweet

How simple is that?!

I find the BEST advice is the simplest advice.

Think about it…

If you stay up till 5 in the morning, you’re probably not going to do anything productive (my mom used to say nothing good happens after midnight and the older I get, the more I realize she was right — even if you’re working, you’re probably not at your full energy)…

… But if you actually get up at 5am and actually get up, you’ll likely be way more productive.

The BEST advice is the simplest advice. Click To Tweet

Back when I was in a relationship, my ex and I committed to getting up at 4:30am every day so that we could workout, read in the morning and get to the gym by 7:30.

If you were to ask him, he’ll tell you how much I hated it and complained every day… But it really was a blessing.

Have you ever stepped outside at 4am?

It’s amazing.

The universe has secrets to tell you that it doesn’t want anyone else to hear and it feels like you’re privileged enough to have a private conversation with whatever spiritual being or metaphysical energy that you believe in.

The universe has secrets to tell you, you just have to wake up early enough to hear them. Click To Tweet

So after my pep talk, I was pumped to get up at 4am this morning.

… And if you’re in our Facebook group, you know about my struggle this morning… I did NOT want to get up.

I literally had to negotiate with my mind… but NOT getting up wasn’t an option, and so I did.

Once I was actually up and washed my face, I was ready for my morning and it was an awesome day.

My perfect morning goes like this:

4:00am – Brush my teeth, wash my face and stretch for a few minutes

4:30am – Write (this is my time to write these newsletters, blog for both my real estate business and Millennial Empire Builders, putting together courses for the Empire Builder Academy, scheduling my social media posts, creating email challenges and all of the other content that I annoy you with 😉 )

6:00am – Go to the gym

7:00am – Get ready, eat breakfast and have a dance party (because we all could use more dance parties at 8:30 in the morning)

8:30am – Brain dump before I start my day

We could all use more dance parties in the morning. Click To Tweet

And let’s get this straight… I am NOT a morning person.

Actually, now that I think about it… I’m not a night owl either.

… I’m a sleep person.

In order to maintain my energy, I need 8.5-9 hours of sleep, however I have to get it… That’s just how my body works.

So go ahead and ask me how often I do my perfect morning routine….

HAH!

I wish I could say it was every day… But it’s not.

It’s a work in progress but the days that I do stick to that schedule, my days are INFINITELY more productive, I eat better and feel so much more accomplished after.

So here are a few of my favorite ways to get up earlier…

STOP TELLING YOURSELF YOU’RE NOT A MORNING PERSON.

Your thoughts become things…

If you keep telling yourself that you’re not a morning person, that thought is so embedded into your brain that your subconscious believes its true.

Being a “morning person” is just a habit that has to be built like going to the gym.

We have 90,000 thoughts in a day and a huge percentage of them are the same thoughts we had yesterday.

The more that you tell yourself that you’re not a morning person, the more you convince yourself that you’re not. Our thought patterns control who we are, the decisions we make and how we feel.

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WAKING UP EARLIER STARTS THE NIGHT BEFORE

If you wake up in the morning after a night of terrible sleep, can’t find anything and are rushing, there’s a 100% chance that you aren’t going to have a powerful start to your day.

I would even argue that your morning starts the second that you get home.

The perfect morning starts the night before. Click To Tweet

Think about it this way — if you get home, throw your stuff down and plop down in front of the TV… Then it’s 6 hours later, you’ve barely eaten anything, have watched more TV than you planned to and realize it’s past your bedtime but you still have stuff to do…

So you end up staying up later to do whatever it was that you were supposed to do earlier.

Instead of “taking 10 minutes to rest” when you walk in the door, stick it out a little longer and have a ‘come home from work’ routine.

Where do you put your keys?

Make dinner.

Put your stuff away and prepare for tomorrow.

Make sure you give yourself a bed time and 30-60 minutes away from social media and TV to wind down before bed.

Once you’ve done that, you can hang out for a few hours with some peace of mind and don’t have to worry about those lingering annoyances of still having stuff to do before bed.

In the workbook that I put together for this post, you’ll identify your potential distractions, lay out your perfect day and even get your priorities in order… and you can download it right here, for free:
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WAKE UP EARLIER THAN USUAL — IN 15 MINUTE INCREMENTS

Do not… I repeat, do not go waking up from 7am to then deciding to get up at 4. It’s not going to work.

Do not go waking up from 7am to then deciding to get up at 4. It's not going to work. Click To Tweet

We get super excited about the potential of achieving our goal so we go from waking up at 8am to now waking up at 5am… and then our body is like what the hell are you doing to me?!

As a result, it only sticks for a few days because your body hasn’t had time to adjust.

Instead, actually get up at the time you’re supposed to for a week.

If you keep setting your alarm at 7am because you know that you need to get up at 8am, stop it…. Force yourself to get up the first time.

Your body won’t like it at first but it’ll get easier.
By doing this, you’ll retrain your body to get up at that time and you’ll start to get tired around your bed time which will make falling asleep easier.

This could take a few weeks to get used to.

Once you’re used to hopping out of bed to brush your teeth and wash your face and have done that for a week or two, set your alarm 15 minutes earlier.

Do that for a week… and keep doing that until you get to your desired wakeup time.

That way your body will have time to adjust.

Which leads me to my next point…

HAVE A MORNING ROUTINE

First things first, get up, fix your bed (it’s harder to get back into a fixed bed once you’re up) and brush your teeth and wash your face.

You are not ‘you’ when you’re laying in your bed… The inner stubborn, temper tantrum five year old inside of you is in control and usually gets his or her way when it comes to hitting the snooze button.

You are not 'you' when you're laying in your bed in the morning. Click To Tweet

Once you’re up and wash your face, you’re up… So hop out of bed and wash your face.

While you’re doing that go listen to something positive – this is so easy… Go on YouTube and search motivation, go to iTunes and subscribe to a few podcasts or download the TED app.

There’s a million different videos and podcasts to get you ready for your day.

If you’re really in need of a schedule for your mornings, I highly recommend that you pick up the book The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. Here’s my improvised version of the routine outlined in the book:

• Do a quick meditation (even if it’s just a minute or two to visualize your perfect day and give yourself a little pep talk)
• Get moving — go do a workout… It’ll make you eat healthier, have more energy throughout your day and you will already have more time to yourself than most people take in a week.
• Learn something new — whether that’s reading 10 pages (if you do this, you’ll read 18 books in a year), listen to an audiobook or watch a quick video that teaches you something. In order to feel fulfilled, you need to be growing and giving… If you grow first thing in the morning, you’re setting the stage for a great day.
• Write something — whether you’re writing down your plans for the day, writing your schedule or just writing down a quick thought, get whatever is in your head down on paper. Your brain is a thinking machine, not a memory machine.

LISTEN TO SOME HYPE MUSIC

Lastly and what I think is most importantly, get excited for the day… Listen to something that will get you awake and ready for the day.

Whether that’s on the way to work or while you’re making your breakfast, it’ll get your energy up.

Maybe 4am is unnecessary for you but waking up earlier can help pretty much anyone get closer to their goals so long as you use that time productively.