Miracle Morning is a 2012 book by Hal Elrod. It’s a self-help book that exclusively focuses on morning habits and routines as tools with which you can improve your life.
A 3 Minute Summary of the 15 Core Lessons
#1 Wake Up Early
More than anything else, those wanting to take advantage of their morning time and truly create a miracle morning routine need to get up early. The morning hours are precious and spending too much time in bed will truncate the actual productivity you can enjoy and prevent you from fulfilling the other steps of your miracle morning routine.
#2 Form a Routine Beforehand
Elrod suggests that it’s smart to form a miracle morning routine before you actually try to implement it. This relates to our ability to make successful habits stick. It’s a lot harder to get into a morning routine if we aren’t sure exactly how the morning will go and what our goals are. Plan your routine ahead of time and it’ll be easier to commit to it.
#3 Get a Good Night’s Sleep
Elrod stresses the importance of sleeping every night even if you can only steal a few hours before you must rise again. The quality of your sleep is just as important as the quantity, and he suggests that getting four hours of high-quality sleep is better than trying to stay awake the entire night and continue on till morning.
#4 The Six-Step Method
Elrod has a six-step method for all morning routines that combines development practices from his personal experience and his study of other successful entrepreneurs. It follows the “S.A.V.E.R.S.” acronym, with each letter standing for a different step in the entire method.
#5 Silence
The first step suggests that you should spend the first minutes of your morning with a period of silence. Rather than relying on an alarm clock that blasts music were immediately turning on the television, you should enjoy a blissful period of silence that will grant you to focus you need to tackle the day ahead and achieve all of your goals. If you pray, you can take this time to do so. You can alternatively meditate if that works better for your spirituality.
#6 Affirmations
This is the next step in the method, and it requires you to vocally identify your important goals and recite affirmations about how and why you will achieve them. Like with the routine itself, it’s important to identify these affirmations before you go to bed. Say these every morning in an organized manner and you’ll start to believe them.
#7 Visualization
The third step in the routine is to visualize the completion of each task or goal, and particularly with visualizing the end of a productive and stress-free day. In this way, you’ll imagine the actual process of achieving your goals and the rewarding finish line that can motivate you to continue even when things get tough.
#8 Exercise
The fourth step in the routine emphasizes the importance of exercise. It’s already well-known from medical personnel and uncountable numbers of books that regular exercise is a critical part of personal health and happiness. But even if you don’t have time to hit the gym, you can still perform a simple exercise routine, such as push-ups or jumping jacks, that will get your blood flowing.
#9 Reading
This is the fifth stage in the routine. Elrod suggests that you spend some time reading in the morning after you fix your morning cup of coffee or breakfast. Reading engages the brain far better than any other type of recreational activity. You can use this time to improve yourself or read for pleasure; it doesn’t matter what you read about, just that you read.
#10 Scribing
The final step in the routine discusses writing. Elrod states that writing provides excellent benefits across all aspects of your mental health and life. Not only does it improve this skill that you will use daily but it also helps you express yourself in more eloquent in mature ways. A journal is a great way to stick to this part of the morning routine.
#11 Enjoy the Life You Have Currently
Elrod says that too many of us wake up already envious of the lives of others or our life in the future. It’s important that we enjoy the lives that we currently have even as we pursue our dreams and chase after goals that can lead to improvements. Enjoying the life that you have is a great way to wake up happy every morning and stop yourself from getting off on the wrong foot.
#12 Don’t Isolate Incidences
Elrod stresses the importance of looking at all the events in your life as part of a big picture. This will prevent you from skipping working out for a day or doing something bad for your health once per week. Don’t look at things as isolated incidents and instead consider every action you take to be part of the broader story of your life and unique goals. Thinking of every action as isolated is a quick way to accidentally become a slacker.
#13 Tell Yourself Your Sleep is Adequate
While it’s true that most people need between 7 to 8 hours of rest every night, you need to go to bed with a good attitude about the quality of your sleep. Telling yourself that you wake up in a great mood and your sleep will be restful is a good way to boost the quality of your sleep regardless of the quantity.
#14 Place the Alarm Away From Your Bed
This simple trick will help you get out of bed. Placing your alarm away from where you can easily reach it will require you to get up and move around in order to stop the incessant beeping.
#15 Drink Water First Thing
Finally, be sure to drink a glass of water as soon as you get up. Many of us are immediately dehydrated once we awaken, so it’s a good idea to fix that ASAP and provide the body with the fuel it needs to start thinking and moving to its maximum potential.
Top 10 Quotes from Miracle Morning
- “Remember, the moment you accept total responsibility for everything in your life is the moment you claim the power to change anything in your life.”
- “Discipline creates lifestyle.”
- “There is nothing to fear, because you cannot fail—only learn, grow, and become better than you’ve ever been before.”
- “We must embrace the fact that if we don’t commit to thinking and living differently than most people now, we are setting ourselves up to endure a life of mediocrity, struggle, failure and regret—just like most people.”
- “Your level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development because success is something you attract by the person you become.”
- “Mediocrity has nothing to do with how you compare to other people; it’s simply a result of not making the commitment to continuously learn, grow, and improve yourself.”
- “One of the saddest things in life is to get to the end and look back in regret, knowing that you could have been, done, and had so much more.”
- “Always remember that where you are is a result of who you were, but where you go depends entirely on who you choose to be, from this moment on.”
- “You are just as worthy, deserving, and capable of creating and sustaining extraordinary health, wealth, happiness, love, and success in your life, as any other person on earth.”
- “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body and prayer is to the soul. We become the books we read.”
Free PDF Download of the Summary to Save or Print
Go here to download The Miracle Morning PDF Summary.
The Miracle Morning Book Summary
Elrod Discusses the Steps to Miracle Mornings
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