In this episode, we discuss the importance of giving yourself momentum to help you accomplish your goals and how that can start with making your bed.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons that you can reflect on in your journal so you can grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and have a better career, better relationships, and better personal finances while you enjoy your morning cup of coffee.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
At the end of today’s podcast episode, I’m going to give you a prompt question to reflect on in your journal. The idea is to take one to five minutes to reflect on today’s lesson and write a minimum of one paragraph on how you can apply the lesson in your life. You can use an actual journal, a word document like on Google Drive, or your note-taking app like Evernote. The idea is that you’re actually thinking about how to process the information to help you improve your life.
In today’s episode, we are going to talk about how we should make our bed in the morning. There is a really great commencement speech by Admiral William McRaven where he says we should make our bed in the morning if we want to win the day.
When you make your bed in the morning, you taking a small step in controlling your day and you’re getting a small win for the day. And this small task can lead you to accomplish another task, and then when you accomplish that task, it will lead you into accomplishing bigger and bigger tasks.
And if you have a bad day and didn’t accomplish anything, at least you have a made bed to come to so you can get a good night’s sleep and then try again the next day.
I know for myself, there is a resistance to getting started sometimes. I’m either laying down on my phone and I know I need to do something, but I’m not feeling motivated to do the task. A trick I use to help me get started is to tell myself that I’m just going to do one small thing. If it comes to doing the dishes or doing something for work, I can just tell myself that I’m just going to wash one dish or I’m going to write one paragraph. I tell myself that I don’t have to do everything but I’m just going to focus on this one chunk.
Then usually what happens is that I continue to work and make a lot of progress. Then I’m happy about my progress and now I’m having a great day. I wrote out this episode at 9 am and went for my morning walk while I listened to my podcast. Then after I made my coffee and started writing, I noticed that today I was supposed to write about the Admiral McRaven lesson about making your bed. And I did not make my bed. I felt bad and I stopped after writing the first sentence to go make my bed. I hate being a hypocrite so I will do what I say.
This technique is about giving yourself momentum and giving yourself a good day. I heard that if you have trouble flossing, try flossing one tooth. If you think about it, you can floss one tooth, and since it only takes a second to floss one tooth, you’re going to finish flossing all your other teeth. Then you’re going to build this habit and it’s going to be easier the next time around.
95 percent of our habits are done unconsciously so we need to build up our good habits and minimize our bad habits. You don’t have to be a machine at all times. If you really want to lay on the couch and play on your phone, then just make sure you earned that time. Or just realize that you’re going to have to make up the time on the back end or the front end.
Life requires us to take action because the distance between our dreams and reality is called action and we need to use every trick we can to stay our path. The more action you can take on your dreams, the more likely they are going to come true and I would say most of the time you just need to start small in order to create something big for yourself.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, make your bed as Admiral McRaven said in his commencement speech. And if you want a link to his speech, just go to the show notes at growwithjoe.me/episode293. Starting with a small task before you tackle those larger tasks can be the perfect warm-up you need to actually do those larger tasks. Success builds upon the success and the more action you take, the more likely you are in completing your tasks. Remember you don’t have to finish something in one shot, you can do it in chunks. Then if you do something over and over again, then you’re also building up your habits. So make sure you’re building up the right habits. And if today was not a good day, at least you have a clean bed to come to and rest so you try again the next day.
Thanks for listening today! To get a free copy of my Audiobook “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and you can download it right there.
I have a quiz on my website that grades your inner circle, so if you want to find out if your inner circle is an A, B, C, D, or F, you can take that quiz at growwithjoe.me/quiz
I’m also trying to do a feedback Friday episode, so if you have a question that you would like to have my answer on the air, just e-mail me at [email protected]
I’m also on Instagram at Grow With Joe and Facebook just look up Grow With Joe
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
*Music outro
