Prime Your Day (without Amazon)

The concept of priming was first introduced to me in the best selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. The idea is that our minds are primed to have certain reactions and to make certain decisions. Priming from advertising is near impossible to avoid nowadays and it has proven damaging effects on our psyche and bank accounts, priming your connection to insecurities such as not having, or not being enough. Kahneman references research that proves that when individuals are primed with images of money they become less cooperative, caring and warm in their future social behavior. So how can we use this phenomenon of priming in our favor? The idea is to prime your day by creating a ritual first thing the morning that cements a foundation for you to spring into a day where you seek value and move towards your goals. Most of us, admittedly including myself from time to time, run the risk of waking up and immediately reaching for the phone to scroll social media, respond to emails, etc. and by doing so we default into “driven doing”, toxic comparison and/or mindless distraction. A good framework to use to experiment with creating a more useful morning ritual is laid out in Hal Elrod’s book The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM). Elrod asserts that our best morning is one that addresses 6 different behaviors; Silence, Affirmations, Visualization, Writing, Reading and Exercising. And, to get ahead of the excuse of “I don’t have time for any of that Tyler”, Elrod claims that to begin this morning priming routine one only need to commit 1 minute to each of these behaviors. If you are reading this saying in your head that “I don't even have 6 minutes in the morning Tyler”, I can safely say with all compassion that you're lying to yourself. I would love to help brainstorm with you to create behaviors that address any or all of these pillars of your intentionally rimed morning. Let’s talk, I can help. 

TM