Today’s tip is all about the Morning Matrix. It’s a two-minute daily practice I created that asks you to answer a few simple prompts each morning to start your day. It helps you set your mindset to help you experience more of what you want and less of what you don’t want throughout the day, and helps you achieve better results in the process. There are eight different prompts to explore each morning, and you can write the answers in a journal, in your preferred software, or you can use my fillable PDF template. You’re going to use your gut instinct, to provide quick, simple, rapid-fire responses to these eight prompts to frame your mindset and align your actions to create better outcomes and great experiences in the process. Here is a quick overview of the 8 prompts:
- “I am grateful for… ” Gratitude is one of the most researched practices in Positive Psychology. It will change everything if you implement a simple gratitude process each day.
- “I choose to feel… ” When you identify the emotional state you want to feel, you will draw more opportunities to experience those states. What you focus on expands, and this is one great way to decide how you want to feel throughout your day.
- “What if… ” Here, you’re going to go into a little bit of possibility thinking. You’re going to ask yourself, “What if…” and it doesn’t matter what the answer is. The questions opens up possibilities rather than constraints. Examples include, “What if I pretended everything was easy?” and “What if I actually asked for the help that I needed?” Just allow that sub-conscious to serve up possibilities that might improve your life experience.
- “I choose to release… ” Ideas include, “I choose to release this way of thinking, this way of feeling, this habit, this disappointment.” As we release things we don’t want to hold on to, we make space for things that we do want in our lives.
- “I re-commit to…” Here, you are going to re-commit yourself to a daily practice that improves your life. We use the 2-Minute Transformation process to structure simple, stress-free ways to build positive new habits in two minutes or less. If you haven’t tried it, it’s worth trying it now—just visit www.DeannaDavis.net for a free online overview that helps you identify how to use this transformational practice. So, this prompt helps you re-commit yourself to a daily practice that improves your well-being or joy in some way.
- “I commit to three key outcomes.” These key outcomes can be for work, home, self-care, family, learning…it’s just your absolute top three key priorities that keep you focusing on what matters most. Because that’s what shapes the live you love.
- “I could really use… ” Examples include, “I could really use some help with this project, I could really use somebody else doing the carpool today, I could really use a deep breath because I need it right now.” No rules for how you finish the sentence…let your body and mind fill in the blanks and see where it leads.
- “Upon reflection… ” Either at the end of the day or the next morning when you’re filling out your matrix, simply reflect on what you experienced the previous day, and that helps you feed into how you want to tweak and approach today’s morning matrix.
Have fun with it. It’s a two-minute practice to help you focus on what matters most and what works best to live a life you love. It makes all the difference to structure your day in a way that makes sense and creates the results you want.
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