Growth Sessions: Create Performance-Enhancing Routines

1. Introduction: hi and welcome to grow decisions. I'm Michelle Bundy's eo behavior design consultant at well, being mental. The aim of these gross sessions is to help you become your bright herself. And in this first class you will learn how to create performance enhancing routines, the classes of primer for developing foundational habits. It's geared towards entrepreneurs and freelancers, just like you people who want to get more out of work in life. But in a way which enhances your well being and helps you to activate more of your potential. There's no experience necessary. All you need is a curiosity to learn, and a desire to improve during the course will be covering three areas, first to the importance of self care and helping you become your bright herself. Second, the habits and behaviors which might be affecting overall performance and third, how do you create small, simple changes to your existing routines to help contract bad habits and help you build better ones? Your class project involves crafting to new routines to help you start and end your day in a better way. So let's take a look at the rest of the lessons and whether we begin we look at our current culture and environment, then we find out more about six specific self care fundamentals. We'll examine your existing routines and take a look at some new options. Finally, we'll bring the soul together for your class project, and the last video is a short wrap up from me. I'm so pleased to have you here, so if you're ready to get started, let's dive in. 2. Where to Begin?: Lesson two. Where do we begin? So where do we begin when we want to improve our routines and why our digital world means we're now always on and this impacts on our health and performance without us realizing it ? It's easy to lose touch with ourselves when we have so many other things clamoring for our attention, and that can have a negative impact on our well being focus and productivity. So the best place to start is by focusing on our self care, because how we care for ourselves is the first foundation stone to living and working better. Having a strong, caring, positive relationship with us is important for two reasons. It's vital for our physical, mental and emotional health, and it effects how we interact with those around us, too. Self care is simple because it involves basic things that we can do daily to improve our performance. But it's also very powerful because if we nourish, nurture and strengthen our body and mind, we create the energy we need to drive everything else we do. I've chosen six specific self care fundamentals to focus on in this course, and we'll go through them in the next lesson. 3. Self-Care Fundamentals: self care fundamentals. In order to develop solid performance enhancing routines, we first need to understand the fundamentals that affect our performance on every level. This lesson cover six of those self care fundamentals. They are sleep, nutrition, movement, breathing, love and work life, cadence, sleep. We all know that a good night's sleep sets us up for the rest of our day. What you might not know is that sleep also helps us cement the memories and learning that have taken place during the course of our day. Sleep also helps our body to heal from the daily stresses and strains that we encounter. But less than at least seven hours of regular Z's actually makes us crappy downwards because it ups are stress hormones and it brings down our cognitive function. This can cause a whole array of different things, such as crazy moods, poor memory, bad decisions, weight gang, early wrinkles, the equivalent of drunk driver behaviour and some even scarier health issues, too. But it's not just how long we sleep, but also how well we see while a comfortable mattress or dark room do play a role. Good sleep actually start with our habits before bedtime. This includes things like late night screen time or stimulants at the wrong time, which can wreak havoc with our sleep patterns. But when we create healthier rituals at night, we become so much better in our days. So when I think about putting your pillow fists for change nutrition, nutrition is the power Smitty in our self care pack. Because proper nourishment supports us mentally, physically and emotionally. What goes and talk out effect our brain function, our behavior and every part of our body both inside, not whether you're a vegan paleo flexitarian or if you eat three traditional meals or fast intermittently. These are all choices that we make based on our lifestyle, culture and beliefs. Don't get me wrong choices good. But when our lives are very busy and stressed, we tend to make or nutritional choices on autopilot, which is not so good. And when the going gets tough, this continues into sugar Crest doughnut junkies or head bitingly hanging angry zombies. So try to be more aware of how your body responds to things like gluten, crabs, sugar, dairy additives and junk foods. And remember that water and nutrient dense foods are good friends feel bad if we can recognize our weak points when it comes to our nutrition, we can work to strengthen them. One bite at a time movement. Our bodies are built for moving, not sitting for long periods. But putting our bombs first has unfortunately become our norm, and it's literally a killer. Our physical framework is like a best major. See there, they're like are built in partners supporting us in life. But you're a liar, and then we need to take care of them, too, by making the most of our bodies natural movement abilities. Now we know that fitness is important, and for most of us, that means doing something before or after work. But we can also stay lumber during our work day on a good place to start is with many movements. It's quite easy. Once or twice an hour. Get up and move your butt. A quick walk around the block taking the stairs, or some star jumps when you wait for the kettle to boil. It's these little movements and efforts over time that will help keep you and your body in tune. And not only will you but thank you, but your heart and your mind or two breathing our brothers, our life as it effects our state of being through every little cell in our body because it happens automatically re tend to forget about it. But paying attention to our breathing is the most reliable way to change our mind and body for the better. Good breathing support, our mood, sleep focus, immunity and stress response, and a host of other bodily functions to we feel are best when we're taking 5 to 60 Billy breaths a minute. But we tend to usually breathe shorter and shallower, especially when we're stressed. And then we're running on fumes when we actually need the oxygen. The most conscious breathing where we control our in and operates for a set period can create a more relaxed or energy estate from which to live and work. So remember, breathe deep, breathe slow, live long love how we respond to people says more about us than them. If we want healthy relationships with others, we start by having a healthy relationship with I, and that includes feeling that we're enough. Even when we are a work in progress, you see to love others well and have them levels back. We first need to love ourselves, warts and all. Imagine what life would be like if you accepted who you are and where you are right at this moment, with no excuses, even when they're not quite where we want to be. Yet being pragmatically optimistic about our capabilities leads to positive interactions with others. And when we live and give from a place of love and grace, it resonates out into the world and invites new possibilities. Beckon. Sharing 11 gratitude doesn't have to be complicated or uncomfortable. It could be a simple as a big smile, a night of recognition giving with no expectation, please, and a thank you or a simple hug. You could start by saying, I love you to the person looking back at you in the bathroom mirror every morning. That's harder than it sounds. Remember, an open heart equals an open mind, So start from the heart cadence. The importance of work Life balance has been drilled into us from every quarter, but trying to keep everything on an even keel all the time, said susceptible down as they will always be some part of our world demanded more of us. So using balance to measure our quality of life is unhelpful because balance is a static concept, so it doesn't move. And that's difficult to maintain for any length of time. And by contrast, in balance implies that to win it one thing we have to lose it. Another strengthening the fundamentals of how we live and work helps us to interact better with the ups and downs of our environment, so that instead of feeling extreme highs and lows, we experience a more manageable rhythm or cadence. The word cadences typically used in music, singing, dancing, cycling, yoga, meditation and anything else that we do, which involves a temper, a pattern or rhythmical flow so we don't need balance. What we need is momentum, because life is always moving and we need to move with it. If we focus on cadence, that means that we can generate some form of momentum on or France, even when one part of our life demands more than the rest. Something to remember. The self care fundamentals that we've covered are all equally important as they're interlinked, doing something in one area, affect the others before we look at how to create a performance enhancing routines. Using self care as our guide, we need to first examine our existing routines, and that's what we'll do in the next class. 4. Existing Routines: existing routines. Creating new routines can be tricky to fit into our existing schedules because we want to create routines that enhance our performance throughout our day. The best place to start is with our morning and evening practices as they form the bookends to our day. How you started and your day has more of an impact on how your day goes and you may realize , and our approach to self care. There's six fundamentals that we covered in the last lesson. All play an important role in our performance, too. So let's start by looking at our existing behaviors, routines and self care habits. It's very common for things like our phone email, social media, news TV, our food and stimulants like coffee or energy drinks to play a big role in our activities throughout our day and night. Research shows that we check off owns about 150 times a day. That has a heavy, distracting impact on our attention and performance. Social media is also designed to create conditioned, addictive responses and how we consume social media and how interacting with it makes us feel an impact on our mental health. In a negative way by causing anxiety and depression. Digital screens have also been shown to have a detrimental impact on our sleep woman's that effects our mood, our quality of sleep and our ability to Netley reinforce what we've learned during the day . This, coupled with poor nutrition, too much caffeine and accidentally lifestyle, all effect our health and our capability. Now we know this and yet we still do it because we've become conditioned to behave in this way. The solution is to develop better digital hygiene habits and take responsibility for how we use our tools and consume things like foods, stimulants and digital media. Carving out 30 to 60 minutes every morning and evening for self care practices can go a long way to help mitigate these negative effects, and the bonus is that it improved your performance, too. Now I know that your life is probably very full, and you might be freaking out at the thought of trying to find an additional our first and last thing when it feels like you have no time at all. But we don't need to find extra time. We need to use our existing time in a different way, so Let's first see what you're currently doing with your time. I'd like you to give some thought to what keeps you busy in that first hour of your morning and the last hour of your evening. I've created a Google doc to help you do this. It's called existing habits, and you'll find it in the class project section underneath of it. Listen videos. The document has instructions on how to make a copy or download to work from it, but you can also use a blank piece of paper or your notebook. This existing habits document has columns for time of day activity and impact. First, make a note of your existing habits, routines, behaviors and activities in that first hour and last hour of your day. Consider the impact of these activities. Which of them helps you prepare for the starter Interview day in a good way? Which of them might hinder you, which take a lot of time or energy? And why are there any that you'd like to change? For example, using this template, you could write in the Activity column. I drink a glass of water first thing and in the impact Colin, it helps me hydrate after sleeping all night or for an evening routine. I use my phone in bed at night. I struggled to fall asleep, and I don't sleep well. Once you've considered what you currently do next, we're going to create a new morning and evening routine for you to try out. 5. NewRoutines - Part 1: new routines, Part one. If we want to optimize our outcomes, we need to let go of those habits which are hindering our performance so that we can make space for ones that help us get to where we want to go. It takes on average, between 2145 days to cement new habits, depending on their complexity, and some can take us longer 60 days. Even the key to making routine stick is to keep them manageable and to do them at the same time every day during them regularly and repeatedly helps you to reinforce their importance in your brain, creating new and stronger neural pathways, except that making these changes might not be fun in the beginning. But think about it this way by creating good morning and evening routines, your planting the seeds that will help you grow into a better you so that you can live and perform at a higher, brighter little. Let's first consider good ingredients for routines that can incorporate the self care fundamentals we covered in an earlier lesson to optimize both the first and last our of our day. We want to include activities which encourage mindfulness movement and learning on which support our nutrition, sleep and self esteem. An hour is the ideal amount of time to fit in 2 to 4 activities. But in our busy lives that sometimes not possible, you can still achieve positive outcomes. With even 15 to 30 minutes, though, think about it this way. If you can spend 15 minutes checking Twitter in the morning, you can certainly appropriate that time to instead drink a glass of water rights and morning pages and do some stretching. I think of each of the elements you include in your routines, just like Lego blocks. For example, you could build up or scale back your morning routine based on your day ahead. So at worst, you can still do 15 minutes off something. But when you have more time, you can add more blocks of activities for me. If I'm pressed for time. My one non negotiable morning activity is to write in my journal while I drink a cup of hot lemon water. I can fit that into 15 minutes and perhaps still have time for three cents amputations. When I have more time, I do more. The important thing is to make it a priority, reserving a manageable window of time in both the morning and the evening. That's just for you and your self care. One of the best things you can do to set yourself up for success is to keep your phone and tablet out of your bedroom, get yourself an analog alarm clock and read printed publications in bed rather than your screen. In the next two, lessons will consider six examples of suitable activities for morning and evening routines . In the first of these, Part two will cover journaling, mindfulness and visualizations. 6. New Routines - Part 2: new routines. Part two journaling Writing a Gratitude Journal is a proven mindfulness practice, which calms the mind and creates the right mindset to start your day. It helps you set intentions, expressed gratitude and track your progress in life. The keys to write in a way that is comfortable for you, taking as much or as little space on the pages you need, so that could be three lines or three pages. After a lot of experimenting, I found what works for me is an adapted version, often first journaling method. Using an a five notebook in the morning, I focus on three steps in my journal. First I make a note about high and feeling when I wake up and any dreams, thoughts or ideas that have come up. Then I write three things that I'm grateful for. There could be big things. Well, they could be a small as the Robin singing in the tree outside my window. And then I write down three things that I think will make today amazing if they happen there. Three more steps to my journaling practice, which take place in the evening. I make a note of three great things that happened during my day, and these could be different to the three things I wrote in the morning. I also know things that could have been better, because this helps me to focus on improving those things tomorrow. Lastly, I make a note of any big things that need to be dealt with tomorrow to get them out of my head so that I can sleep better mindfulness and meditation before we step out into the noise and distraction that comes with our day. It's really valuable to practice being present and aware. It's been discovered that regular meditation changes us at a cellular level. It can help with focus, awareness, attention, decision making and managing stress. It can also be healing. There are many different ways to meditate on, although the aim is to still the mind. The practice is actually more about noticing the business of our minds, because by becoming more aware of the chatter, we can become more able to separate ourselves from it. The most common method is using the power of your breath to guard mindfulness. I find that using a guided meditation app like headspace or calm is extremely helpful, especially when you're just starting out with meditation, but I also practice something called controlled box type breathing, usually for about 5 to 10 minutes. It's the quickest way to change my state. If I'm feeling anxious or tired, why not try it? Breathe in for four counts, hold for two counts and breathe out for six. You can change the timing of the Brits to suit your breathing capacity. The key is just to keep it slow and steady. Your mindfulness practice could involve movement such as walking in nature, where you can pay attention to the smells, sounds and sights of do you encounter. Or it could just be stillness, simply sitting with a cup of tea and the cat watching the sun rise through the window. If you're using an up on your phone to help you meditate, to remember to turn off notifications to avoid distractions, visualizations and affirmations. Another way to enhance your performance and enable positive Arkan's is to cement the idea of your success firmly in your mind's eye because it's Henry, Ford said. Whether we think we can, what we can't were right. A good way to bolster our self confidence and strengthen our identity is through visualizations and affirmations, which we can repeat on a daily basis. Here's a quick way to get started. Create a short list of the main goals that you want to achieve in your life. The type of person that you want to be and the heroes and influences really were imagined, who inspire you and reflect the values that you want to emulate. Reading these every morning and evening in bids. Positive visual images in your mind that help you to become more of the person that you want to be every day. A simple way to develop a practice around visualization and affirmations is to create index cards as shown in this example. They're really easy to read and carry with you, and they slip easily into your journal for safekeeping so that you can connect those two practices as part of your routines. In part three of new routines, We focus on exercise, learning and making, and we also consider our food and drink choices 7. New Routines - Part 3: new routines. Part three Exercise. Do something that lumbers you up for the day. It can be like movements such as walking stretches tighty or to go Well, perhaps it's something more intense, like weights, swimming, running or cycling. Well, maybe it's a combination of strength and stretch, such as yoga for your morning routine. Your exercise should be something you can either do from home or which doesn't involve a commute, so you can literally just step out of the door and do it. Even if you only have a 30 minute window in total, you can still get in a good stretch session in just 10 to 15 minutes. There plenty of free online exercise resources that you can access for home practice. Personally, I often do yoga with Adrian Mishler. She's got a fantastic channel on YouTube. We may go to the gym or for a run before or after work, but intense exercise before bed isn't recommended as that wakes us up a short walk or some gentle stretches involving slow breathing or a good way to relax your body before you sleep , especially if you're feeling tense. Learning and making studies show that our brains retain information well in the 1st 2 to 3 hours of our day, so why not use a bit of your morning time to learn? Consider reading 10 to 20 pages of a book, which teaches you something new. Well, maybe you listen to a podcast, watch a nature documentary or even do a skill share lesson or two. Making things with our hands can be a useful addition to our routine, too. Taschen hobbies that help you think with your fingers can be quite relaxing and meditative whilst also helping to develop skills. Examples include drawing, knitting, woodcarving, sewing and so forth. Remember that the blue based light from our phone, TV and computer screens affects our melatonin production, which is an important sleep woman. So it's recommended that you stop using screens at least an hour before bed. Consider reading a book or doing something that doesn't involve blue light. Instead, if you must use the screen, there are a few downloadable or built in absentia could use, such as flux or night shift. They help you to shift the screen color to the warmer end of the spectrum. Food and drinks. Nutrition is a complex topic, so I'm not gonna go into detail, but I will touch on a few things First, whatever floats your boat in terms of your daily menu, consider what is going to help you maintain a consistent level of energy during the day. This prevents spikes and dips while feeding yourselves with the goodness of the driver. Can you take some time to sit with and appreciate your first meal instead of consuming it in a rush on your commute or at your desk while you're talking emails? Second, eating a heavy meal later in the evening destructor digestion and can affect your sleep Too much caffeine, sugar and other stimulants can have the same effect, too, so test and decide on a cut of time. Studies show that coffee off the two PM can hinder the quality of your sleep. Where is a cup of herbal tea before bed can calm the mind and a digestion in general. Try to avoid fizzy drinks because they dehydrate, cause brittle bones, affect hormones and contain hidden sugars and artificial ingredients. Most of us are actually chronically dehydrated without realizing it. So when and dart drink water when thirsty drink water and even when you're not thirsty. Drink water and try to use reusable bottles, filters and less plastic where possible. A recent study has found plastic microbeads in many different bands off plastic bottled water. So based on those six suggestions, give some thought to how including a few of these activities and your new routines may benefit you in the next lesson will be putting them together to create your class project. 8. Your Class Project: your class project. So now it's time for us to bring these elements together for your project. There are five steps to creating your performance enhancing routines, so let's get started. Step one. After reviewing your existing behaviors and considering the examples in the last video, it's not time for you to create your own routines to help you put this together. There's a Google doc template that you can use called my routines. You'll find this document in the class project section underneath the lesson videos. It has a list of instructions and then two separate pages for you to fill in your morning and evening routines. Choose the amount of time that you want to allocate for your routines. 30 to 60 minutes for each is best based on the amount of time you'll make available. Choose between two and five activities to start and end your day, which don't involve looking at social media or email. Here's an example of what the morning routine template looks like below your activities. You also list the actions you need to take to help you for full these routines every day. For example, put my journal beside the bed and leave the phone in the lounge or lay off my yoga mat before I go to bed or set a reminder to start my evening routine at a certain time. The second step is to create a cover page, which you can upload as your skill share Project page. You can do this for free on canvas dot com. Well, as a slide in PowerPoint or using something similar, you need to then save or converted to J. Peg or PNG toe uploaded on skill share that I mentioned should be landscape or 16 by nine or 1 to 80 by 7 24 Best viewing a sculpture. If using convert, go to Canvey dot com. It's really easy to set up a free account. You can use canvas custom template option to create a page that is 1 to 80 by 7 20 pixels and dimension, or choose the landscape a full option. Canada is fairly easy to use that as it allows you to drag and drop artistic elements such as text and images, and you can also upload photos to use as a background for your cover page. Choose a background that works for you add your name and give you routines and name to, for example, Michael Superpower Steps or Rachel's daily dose of wonderful get creative, because this cover image is going to help inspire you to keep up with your routines. You'll then upload this image to skill share as part of your class project. The third step is to create a new project on skill share. You can create your project. Fire the class project tab. Beneath the lessons. You'll find the baton at the very bottom of the section called Create Your Project. Upload your cover page image to skill share as part of your class project in the body of your project. Include some general info about what you want to achieve. You can share as much or as little info about your routines As you feel comfortable. Press publish, and your new project will now appear in the old project section. Remember that you can edit your project at any time via the your project tab. I've created an example project, which you can view via the All Projects section to give you an idea of what you can include . Difficult to say hi and share a browse a link to a project in the course comments to so that others can comment on offer support on what you're doing. The fourth step is the big one. Start to practice your routines for a week and track your progress. You can use a sheet of paper or a notebook, but I've also created a handy Google she'd called Track your progress. Surprise, Surprise. You'll find it in the class project section under the lessons. You can make a copy of it and use it to log your daily routines at the day to the top of each page at the start of each week. For example, we commencing ninth of April in the AM and PM boxes make a tick or a cross or mark. Yes, no sort of party or whatever wording appeals to you to indicate your success in completing your morning and evening routines. Then, in the notes section dropped on anything that's relevant to your progress. What did you find? Difficult forward able to do? What did you enjoy? How was doing your routine make you feel it's important to do this so that when you review at the end of the week, you can start to see the patterns of your routines taking shape and then tweak them were necessary. This document is for your personal record, so you don't need to share it on skill share. The first step is to report back at the end of your first week, update your project page or the comments to let us know how you getting on. What are your observations and findings. Consider what's working and what's not. Is this something you're struggling to implement? Is that something you could be doing in a better way? Is there a different activity that you'd rather introduce? Adjust your routine accordingly and continue practicing and cementing your new dating habits. This is a fluid practice that needs to be adaptable to fit with your life. If you take action refined where necessary and keep repeating it, then you're well on your way to developing your bright herself. Remember that you're in learning mode. It takes practice to assimilate thes activities into a new lifestyle and for them to become a firm part of your new identity. So be kind to yourself if you find that you don't do it quite right. It first, even if you struggled to follow through in the beginning, Do make the effort to at least make a start every morning and evening with your new routines. You can't finish it if you don't start it in the first place. If you do that every day, you'll notice that these routines soon become a more natural part of your life. And remember to make it fun. See the joy and what you're doing and hard is helping you become your bright herself. Celebrate your progress and small winds every single day. I look forward to seeing your project covers here on skill share, and I can't wait to see you taking action on your new routines. 9. Wrap Up: so well done. That's a wrap on this first class. Let's do a quick recap on what we've come. It We considered how our environment effects our behavior and we learn more about self care fundamentals. We examined our existing routines and we created two new ones, and your class project is now an excellent way for you to reinforce those new behaviors. A few things to remember as you start practicing your routines decent morning and the evening routine set you up for a great day every day. Sticking with them on a daily basis is always easier when we keep them simple, manageable and repeatable. By following through every day, you are nurturing the seeds that will help you grow into a better performing more effective you. I can't wait to see your project on. I'd like to hear your experience off this class in the same way that you will refine your routines over time. There's always room for me to improve with my class, too. Thank you so much for joining growth sessions. I wish you well on this journey to a bright herself on. I'll see you in the next class. Bye for now