This great quote by Jim Rohn, the late, great American author and speaker, is at the heart of your daily progress, productivity and resilience. Waking up and switching yourself on to be fully conscious and in control of your thoughts and actions is the best possible start you can make to your day. It features strongly within the Control and Commitment scales within the MTQ 4C’s mental toughness framework.
Three important elements of ‘running your day’ include;
Decide your outcomes
Consciously articulating the outcomes you want to achieve by the end of the day allows you to develop a workable framework to make them happen. By visualising what you have to do and the likely problems and opportunities you will encounter, you can feel empowered and in control before you start the day.
Making it happen
Running your day to achieve the outcomes you want, involves having an intense focus on doing what you have to do to tick off the goals on your list. This can be incredibly difficult if you aren’t ‘switched on’ and focused. You can become easily distracted and diverted by anything less than a resolute internal commentary and any number of external challenges, obstacles and setbacks. Using or adapting the Podomoro technique (working for focused blocks of time, typically 25 minutes separated by short breaks) helps you trade ‘focus for fun’ during the day to get things done. When you feel you are procrastinating or wasting time switching back into the ‘running your day’ mindset will get you moving again.
Staying in motion
Whilst the notion that sharks will drown if they stop swimming isn’t universally true it still resonates with us humans because we feel mentally healthier and stronger if we are in control of our daily thoughts and actions. We feel more empowered if we’re ‘in motion’ of doing things that resonate with our purpose and help us to achieve our goals and objectives. Staying in motion by making things happen helps us remove feeling helpless and overwhelmed, discouraged and demotivated by the daily grind. Staying in motion enhances our probability of making things happen in the way we want which reinforces our confidence and self belief.
Engaging these three principles will allow you to ‘run the day’.
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