Hal Elrod on How to Have a Miracle Morning

The Wellness Mama Podcast

285: How to Have a Miracle Morning and Organize Your Day With Hal Elrod

00:00 / 01:05:31

I am a huge believer in the power of a story, and my guest today has several almost unbelievable chapters to share. Hal Elrod is known for his incredible ability to shine light on even some of the darkest tragedies, of which he’s experienced several in his own life. His book The Miracle Morning has made all the difference in how I start my day, and I can attest firsthand that his formula works.

If you’ve been wanting to make changes, reach some new goals, or learn better habits, today’s episode is a must. Hal will also share about his personally tested ways to gain motivation, clarity, and purpose in just a few minutes every morning.

Episode Highlights With Hal Elrod

The mindset that helped Hal overcome personal tragedy to become a successful author and motivational speaker
How to train our brains to see the positive even in the worst situations (and why we’d want to)
What Hal means by a “miracle morning” and how he came up with the concept
The difference between you and most CEOs (it’s not much!)
Ways to increase accountability in your daily life
And more!

Resources We Mention

More From Wellness Mama

What is your own version of a miracle morning routine? Please drop a comment below or leave a review on iTunes to let us know. We value knowing what you think and this helps other moms find the podcast as well.

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and this episode is all about maximizing your morning routine. I am here with Hal Elrod who is on a mission to elevate the consciousness of humanity one reader at a time. He’s the author of the international best seller “The Miracle Morning” as well as his newest book “The Miracle Equation” and he’s doing just that.

After overcoming multiple near-death experiences that we talk about in this episode, and impacting millions of lives, he has dedicated his own life to showing others how to overcome their challenges so that they can fulfill their unlimited potential. This is a super fun episode, it has some really practical tangible things that you can implement in your own morning. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

Hal, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here.

Hal: Katie, it is a pleasure really, thank you so much for having me.

Katie: Well, I’m so excited to chat with you because I am a huge believer in the power of a story. And I know from a little bit of research about you and from reading your books that you have actually quite an amazing story that has multiple chapters. So, to start with, for those people who are not familiar with you, can you just give us an overview of who you are and your story and how you got to this place that you are now.

Hal: Yeah, I’ll do the high level because I’m a keynote speaker I’m very long-winded, and if I start to get into the story which we can dive into each one. But, you know, all of a sudden, I’ll realize I haven’t even taken a breath yet and I’m like 12 minutes into my story. But, so, high level. When I was…I grew up very average or mediocre if you will, meaning, you know, I was a C student. I wasn’t an athlete. I wasn’t popular. I didn’t really have, other than all the gifts that, we’re each born with unique gifts, I didn’t really wasn’t born with any really amazing standout talents. And then when I was 15 I fell into a job DJing. I DJ’d school dances, and weddings, and anniversaries, and then I got hired at the radio station. And that became my dream was to be a radio DJ.

And then fast forward at 19, a buddy of mine almost tricked me into going to work with him and he was in sales, and he sold Cutco cutlery. And I had no interest in being in sales. I was at another radio station at that point after my first year of college. And I met the manager, Jesse Levine and ended up, Jesse really sold me on the idea that, you know, setting my own schedule and having no ceiling on my income, and it was kind of, and all the experience I could gain. I decided to give it a shot, and I started selling Cutco cutlery, and in my first 10 days I broke the all-time company record. Which meant I’d sold more kitchen knives in the first 10 days of anyone that had worked before me in 50 years. And it was kind of a crazy thing for me because I went from being this average kid to like, “Whoa, I didn’t know I had this in me,” you know. And that for all of us, we have so much more within us, so much more potential than we have yet to tap into.

A year and a half later I was giving a speech at a Cutco Conference and driving home after the speech in a brand new Ford Mustang. I just bought my first new car. I was hit head-on by a drunk driver at 80 miles an hour. And my car spun off of the drunk driver and the worst was actually yet to come, you’d think what’s worse than a head-on with a drunk driver at 80 miles an hour, but, the car behind me, I spun in front of them and they crashed into my driver’s side door at 70 miles an hour and crushed my car door into the left side of my body. And instantly I broke 11 bones. I broke my femur in half, I broke my pelvis in three places, I broke my arm, my humerus behind my bicep in half, shattered my elbow, broke all the bones around my eye, my eye socket was shattered, severed my ear and begin losing a lot of blood. And that night I bled to death. I was dead for six minutes on the side of the freeway. After they pulled me out of the car, the car was kind of keeping me alive. And I bled to death, I was clinically dead for six minutes, rushed to the hospital, in a coma for six days, I flatlined twice more in the coma. And when I came out of the coma, I was told by doctors that I would never walk again, and I had permanent brain damage.

And, you know, at any age, that’s tough to take, but at 20 I had a lot of goals that involved, you know, walking again, and the use of my brain. And I decided that I would not accept the doctor’s diagnosis as the ultimate fate, that I was going to believe I could walk again and have faith that I could walk again until I was proven otherwise. And I’d accepted that I would, and I’d go, “Well, maybe I’ll never walk again.” And if I never walk again, I told my dad, “I’ll be the happiest person that you’ve ever seen in a wheelchair dad, because I will not let a wheelchair define my quality of life. I will not let it define my emotional well-being.” And the power of the mind-body connection, three weeks after the crash, two weeks after I came out of the coma, the doctors came in with routine X rays and they said, “We don’t know how to explain this, Hal, but your body is healing so quickly that we’re actually gonna let you take your first step today in therapy.” And even me being, you know, faithful, and hopeful, and optimistic, I was thinking maybe I could walk in like a year, not in three weeks, you know, or two weeks after I woke up, and I took my first step and the rest is kind of history as they say.

And then I’ll kind of wrap up the big picture story with just two other pieces. In 2007 when the U.S. economy crashed, that was kind of what I would call my second rock bottom, the car accident being my first. During my second rock bottom, when the economy crashed, I kind of crashed with it. I was an entrepreneur and my business failed. I couldn’t pay the mortgage, I lost my house, I physically started declining in terms of my body fat percentage tripled in about six months. I wasn’t exercising, I was depressed, I was scared, I didn’t know how to turn it around.

And I created this morning ritual. This was like my desperate attempt to turn things around. I created a morning ritual. I wanted to create the ultimate morning ritual. And the idea was that, I was studying the world’s most successful people, just googling and looking for what are their rituals and routines? I need to start changing things in my life if I want my life to change. And I kept coming across morning rituals that I’m like, “No, I’m not a morning person, like what else do they do?” And long story short there or long story longer, I decided to create, I go, “I’m gonna create not just the morning ritual, I’m gonna create the ultimate morning ritual. I’m gonna take like the best personal development practices in the history of humanity, and I’m gonna combine all of them.”

And the next morning I woke up and over the course of an hour, I meditated for 10 minutes, I did 10 minutes of affirmations, 10 minutes of visualization, 10 minutes of exercise, 10 minutes of reading, and 10 minutes of journaling. And that morning, I went from being depressed and scared to going “Wow, I feel inspired. I feel motivated, I feel energized, I feel optimistic. If I start every day like this, it’s only a matter of time.” But I thought it’d probably be, again, like six months to a year of this slow, gradual compound effect. But within two months of doing this morning ritual, didn’t have a name, it was just personal development in the morning that I did at 5 am. And within two months, I more than doubled my income, I went from being in the worst shape of my life physically to deciding to train for a 52-mile ultramarathon, I’d never run before. And I completed the marathon, you know, six months later.

And I went to my wife and I said, “Sweetie,” I go, “We just officially have surpassed the highest, two months ago we were in debt and couldn’t pay the bills. We just surpassed the highest monthly income we’ve ever had,” which at that time was $12,000 a month. And I said, “It feels like a frickin miracle that, you know, this little morning ritual it’s like how it’s changing my life.” And she goes, “It’s your miracle morning.” And I go, “Yeah, miracle morning,” and, you know, it wasn’t a book I just wrote it down. And, you know, now “The Miracle Morning” is a book and it’s sold 1.7 million copies, it’s translated in 37 languages, it’s practiced every day by, you know, over a million people.

And then the last part of the story is. Two years ago, I woke up unable to, I couldn’t breathe, I had trouble breathing, and turned out I took 11 days of me having my lungs, 16 pounds of fluid drained from my lungs every day and a half I’d go to the ER and have a giant needle stuck in my back through my rib cage. And it took them about two weeks to figure out what was wrong, but I was diagnosed with a very rare aggressive form of cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia and I was given a 30% chance of surviving. You know, I’ve two small kids, they were seven, my daughter was seven at the time, my son was four. And, you know, for any anyone but especially a parent, you know, the idea of leaving your family without a father was terrifying.

And I made the same decision that I made when I was told I would never walk again. And I thought, “I will maintain unwavering faith that I will beat this cancer and live a long, healthy life with my children until I’m proven otherwise.” And I’m very grateful to say that after the most difficult year of my life where I was in the ER fighting for my life many times and almost dead and lost 25% of my body weight, at six feet tall I was 127 pounds. But I’m about a year of being cancer-free and in remission and now on a mission to elevate the consciousness of humanity one person at a time. And that brings us to today.

Katie: That’s incredible. And I’m so curious, because I feel like when presented with a really tough scenario in life, and you’ve definitely had a couple of those, people can go a couple of different ways. And I often see people fall into that like “Why me” mentality and I’m curious, why do you think it is that you didn’t ask why me, or take those answers that you were given from the doctors at face value? What do you think in you made you able to resist that and to choose an alternate path?

Hal: Yeah, and I think I know pretty close to exactly why. And I can’t take all the credit for it, it was really a mentor of mine. When I was in my Cutco training on day two I think, my manager and mentor, Jesse, taught us what he called the five-minute rule. And he said, “Look, sales is a microcosm for life, when you go out there, you’re gonna have goals and you’re gonna have dreams and ambitions. You’re gonna be working towards things, and you’re going to run into obstacles, and challenges, and adversity. You’re gonna, you know, be working towards a goal and, you know, be on track and then you’re gonna have your biggest order for the week, they’re gonna call and cancel.” And he said, “This is just, it’s just reality. There are a lot of things that happen that are out of your control, and you can only control the things that you can control.”

And he said, so the five-minute rule is that, whenever something happens that is unpleasant, or painful, or scary, or difficult, he taught us to literally set our timer on our phone for five minutes. And we got five minutes to complain, cry, vent, punch a wall, like whatever, you know, just like urgh, feel the pain, feel the emotion. And he said, “When the timer goes off, you take a deep breath, and you say three very powerful words ‘Can’t change it.” And you remind yourself that, “I can’t go back in time and change it. So there’s no value in continuing to feel upset about it. The only intelligent choice that I have really to make is to accept it fully and be at peace with it, and then be proactive to move toward where I wanna go in my life or in my work.” You know, get on the phone, make more calls, whatever it is in that setting.

And so I had, you know, when I first learned the, and by the way, this is one of those important lessons I teach now even when I speak. I mean, it’s crazy to think 20 years later I’m teaching this to thousands and thousands of people and, you know, in live audiences and online but it’s still this five-minute rule where, when I first learned that, like most people, they’re like, you know, I thought, “Can I get like a five-day rule, I need to be pissed off for like five days, like, five minutes is not enough.” And sure enough, the first few times I did this little five minute rule, I’d set the timer and the timer would go off and I’d go, “I’m still mad, like, I’m still upset,” right?

But here’s the interesting thing that happened. When we elevate our consciousness, when we become consciously aware of a different way of thinking or living, a better way of thinking or living and we start, you know, we be aware of it, and then we stay present to it, and we live in alignment with it, it changes everything for us. And what happened is, after a few days, maybe a week of doing this, where, you know, at first I thought, there’s no way I can get over it in five minutes. I would set the timer for five minutes and I’d go, “Son of a gun, I can’t believe that lady canceled the appointment, I’ve been working on this for weeks, and gosh, darn it, urgh, oh, man.” And then I pick up my phone and look at the timer and I’d have, you know, four minutes and 32 more seconds, and I’d go, “I’m over it.” And I’d go, “Why sit here and stew on something I can’t change for another four and a half minutes when I could probably make three more calls and schedule another appointment to make up for that one?” And so the five-minute rule became a kind of a five-second rule, where I just needed five seconds to go, “Son of a….,”, you know, and just get upset and feel it for a second. But then I just moved on.

And so I applied that in every area of life, not just my career, not just sales. So when I would be in traffic, I remember when I literally can picture myself on the freeway in Sacramento, when I had this first time I realized this applied to traffic. And this is for anybody, you don’t have to get cancer or be in a horrific car accident to apply the five-minute rule and apply this idea of accepting the things you can’t change. But, when I was in traffic one day I went, I was frustrated, I was running late, and I was just going through my head, just all the thing “Oh, I’m gonna lose this appointment, or I’m gonna lose this…” and all this stuff. Things that were all out of my control and I went, “Wait a minute, I can’t change the pace of the cars in front of me, I can’t change that I’m running late, and I can’t change the way the person reacts when I get there, that’s not up to me. But I can choose how I spend every moment in this car.” And to me, this is a metaphor for life. We can choose how we spend every moment of our lives regardless of what’s going on around us. It doesn’t matter what’s going on around us, it’s what’s going on inside of us that determines our emotional well-being and our quality of life. And so traffic became a sense of joy for me. I went, “Hey, when I’m in traffic, I’m just gonna be grateful, I’m gonna be grateful for everything I’d be grateful for.” It’s a time to slow down and think, you know.

And then the day I was diagnosed with cancer, because I had 20 years of practice or 17 years at that time of practicing this five-minute rule. The day I was diagnosed with cancer, I called my wife because she was out of town when I found out, and I was told I had a 30% chance of surviving. And I called her and I said, “Sweetheart, what I’m going to tell you is probably going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever told you. But I wanna preface it by saying I believe this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It’ll probably be the most difficult thing that’s ever happened to me and for our family, but I believe it’s the best thing because this is going to give me the greatest opportunity to learn, and to grow, and to become better than I’ve ever been before as a husband, as a father, as a leader, as a human being, and I also believe it’s gonna allow me to impact more people than I have ever even imagined.” And, you know, I will be honest, she did not take that same stance of it being the best thing that ever happened that day. In fact, I don’t know if she’s still quite there yet.

But, yeah, but I mean, it really stemmed from that simple realization that there’s no value in feeling sorry for yourself or dwelling on something after the fact, after it’s already happened. And sadly, I mean, a lot of people are suffering over their childhood. They’re still suffering over things because when they, you know, abuse or something that happened when we were kids, and we think it’s the abuse that’s causing us pain to this day, but it’s not abuse, it’s that we haven’t made the decision to just accept it and be at peace with it. So, yeah, so that for me was the biggest difference.

Katie: That’s amazing. And you mentioned your parents as well. As a mom of six, I just thought about how amazing and tangible that is to use with our kids, you know, when they’re upset, or they’re facing something, give them those five minutes. And I’ve had, like a neuroscientist and movement specialist on here before that said, you know, kids are great because they actually do express their emotions with their body and they shake it out, and they yell, and they do all that. But give them a time limit on it, and be like, “You know what? get it all out.”

Hal: Yeah. And then that empowers them like, “Hey, I’m setting the timer, do whatever you want,” right? Like, give them a punching bag, you know what I mean? Make it fun, you know. And then, you know, they could literally be upset and then kind of laughing and, you know, and it’ll help them get through it faster. That’s a great connection of parenting. Yeah.

Katie: Yeah, I love that. And you’ve also mentioned the word miracle a couple of times, and I’m truly impressed by your ability to keep a really positive mindset in the face of some pretty drastic life, you know, challenges. But I’m curious how you would define the word miracle, because I feel like that word can maybe have different meanings to a lot of different people.

Hal: Yeah, I’m glad you asked that because you’re right. It’s a really loaded word. And I think that for a lot of people, it has a bad rap. And it has a bad rap for a few different reasons, right? I think the biggest one is, miracles are thought of as random passive acts or events. And if you’re religious, maybe you believe that, you know, God creates miracles, right? So you really, you know, all you can do is pray and then, but again, passively sit back and wait, right? Or hope.

I personally am a big believer in personal responsibility, right? You know, with my car accident, I took ownership. “I’m going to walk again.” With cancer, “I’m going to beat cancer.” With “The Miracle Morning,” “I’m going to change millions of lives.” Like, I’m not gonna hope that Oprah finds me. I’m not gonna hope that, you know, this miracle drops in my lap. I believe in the power of personal responsibility. And I really believe that, you know, along those lines, that, to the degree that we take responsibility for everything in our lives determines the degree of power that we have, personal power to change or affect things in our lives.

And so the way that I define miracle is really more of a practical, actionable, and even measurable way. And so I define miracle as any meaningful outcome that is beyond the realm of what you currently believe is probable for you. I’ll break that down. Any meaningful outcome, right? So, you know, for me it was beating cancer, doesn’t get much more, when your life’s on the line, there’s no more outcome more meaningful than living, right? Than actually making it through. When I had the car accident it was walking again. When I was, you know, with my career, right? It was, I wanted to reach millions of people with this Miracle Morning message, and I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t have an audience, I didn’t have a platform, I didn’t have anything, you know, and by the way, I will tell you, my goal was to do it in one year, and I was 99.9% short of my goal the first year. I was 99.7% short of my goal still up to the second year, and it took me six years, but I just kept at it, I kept at it, I kept at it.

So, any meaningful outcome beyond the realm of what you currently believe is probable for you. And that word probable is important, I didn’t say possible. And the reason is this. If you’re an optimist, which I would consider myself, an optimist to the point of delusion. Like I’m very optimistic, right? It’s worked out for me, but I always say there’s a fine line between optimism and delusion, and I do cross it, you know, quite often. But, I’d err on that side I think and be okay with that. But, we don’t pursue that which is possible, right? So if you’re an optimist, you believe anything is possible, but we don’t pursue that which is possible, we pursue that which is probable, right? Katie, think about it, like, you know, when is the last time that you or that anybody, you know, was like, “I have this goal, this dream, and I think that the odds of me achieving it are slim to none, so I’m gonna give it everything I have.” Right? Like, we don’t work that way.

And that’s why most people, sadly, that’s what my new book “The Miracle Equation” is all about. Is it’s like, how do you move your biggest goals from possible, to probable, to inevitable. Because, for most people, we have these big goals and these dreams and these things we’d love to achieve but because we don’t believe they’re probable we never even try. What’s probable is, “Hey, I know that if I show up to work, I’ll get a paycheck, and I can at least buy food and pay my rent, or my mortgage, and my car payment.” And that, at least there’s certainty, at least that’s probable. So I’m gonna keep doing that because I don’t know that all these goals and dreams and the life that I really want, I don’t know that it’s very probable.

In fact, what we do is we check what I call our rearview mirror in our subconscious mind, and we look for evidence of what’s probable, and if we’ve never done something before, right? If you wanna start a business, or write a book, or, you know, lose weight, or whatever the goal or dream, whatever your goals or dreams are. If we check the rearview and we go, “Gosh, there’s nothing in my past that shows, that gives me evidence that I could do these things, I’ve never done them.” But if you look at the world’s most fulfilled people, successful people, happy people that have made the biggest impact in the world and even just in their own lives, they all had to step out on faith. And I’m talking about faith in themselves, that they could do something that when they checked their rearview, there was no evidence they could do it. They had never done it before.

But you have to do that, you have to step out on faith. And that’s the first step. Stepping out on faith is the first step to move your biggest goals and dreams from possible, which is existing in a void of nothingness. Everything is possible, and nothing is…right? Like possibility, it doesn’t matter what’s possible, you have to move your big goals from possible to probable, and the first step in doing that is stepping out on the faith. And I believe doing it in writing, right? Putting it in writing, so that you have, it’s tangible, it’s physical, you can hold it in your hands or at least, you know, look at it on your iPhone. But just step out on faith that you can do something that you’ve never done before.

And that first step, just the step of considering it, right? And putting it on paper is considering it not just as a thought in your head that’s fleeting, but actually where it’s a little more tangible. And then once you consider it, start to read that every day and marinate it, and then support it with, what if that were to happen? Why would that be meaningful to me? How could that change my life? How could that change my family’s life, right? And write those things down, put them in front of you, look at them every day and then, I think was Mark Victor Hansen. I love when he said this, and I remember this, I saw him give a speech, gosh, 10 years ago. And he said, “Look, people never make changes…” and I’m paraphrasing of course, but he said, “People never make changes because they think they have to go from where they are now to where they wanna be and they’ve got to like make one leap there, you know, or make a complete 180.” And he said, “That’s challenging, that’s mentally challenging to even think about that.” He said, “Don’t try to make a leap.” He said, “Just lean into the changes that you wanna make.”

And that’s what I’m talking about here, right? As you write it on paper, well, what might my dream look like? What might that tangible, measurable miracle look like? What would that look like? And then support it with some, you know, some bullet points underneath. What would life be like if I were to do that? And then ask yourself how, how might I do that?

And the first step is often a Google search, right? People are coming, they’re like, “I wanna write a book, but don’t even know where to start.” I go, “Have you googled how the words, “how to write a book?”” And they go, “No,” I go, “That’s pretty low hanging fruit. I would start there,” right? And all of a sudden, you’re gonna have 10,000 articles that will tell you exactly how to do what you now think you have no idea how to do, you’re five seconds away from learning how to do it, right?

So, the point is, and this is a long answer to your question, but, a miracle is any meaningful outcome outside the realm of what you believe is probable for you. And the first step in achieving said miracle is to step out on faith, put it in writing of what that miracle would be for you, what that big goal or dream would be for you. And then just start leaning, leaning into it.

And if you’ve waited years, you know, if you’ve spent your entire life not pursuing your biggest goals and dreams, well, what’s another, you know, just start and just, you don’t need to rush. Just take the next month to just journal about it, just journal for a month, right? What would it look like? What would that make your life like? How might you do that, right? And just lean into it, and then you can start to actually formulate a plan.

And then, by the way, the second decision of “The Miracle Equation” is extraordinary effort. And that’s where, that doesn’t mean that you need to work 80 hours a week, right? That just means doing one thing every day. That just means leaning every day. Extraordinary effort is not about working long, hard hours, it can be, but that’s not what it has to be, it’s about consistent effort. If you do one thing every day that moves you closer to your goal or dream, your success is inevitable, the only variable is timing. And most people, they just never get out the gate. Because they check that rearview mirror and they go, “Yeah, nothing in my past says that I can create this extraordinary future.” But, you can. And then one day, you’ll look in your past, you go, “Wow, I can create anything I want for my life.”

Katie: I love that. I think two important things that I’ve noticed in my own life that you just mentioned, is that consistency variable. Certainly, my husband and I often say doing the right things long enough, consistently, and it takes all of that. But I also love that you brought up taking ownership and extreme ownership, because that’s another thing I really have tried to instill in my kids and in my own life. Because I think it’s one of the most freeing things we can do. Like you said, we have no control over the things that happen to us in a lot of cases. Certainly not how other people may talk to us, or act toward us. But we always do have control of our own reaction and our own actions in our life. And so I think when you make that mental switch it’s a whole new world of freedom. And I love that you talk about that so much.

Also, I feel like, especially with “The Miracle Morning” there’s a lot of people in the world who know a lot of the good things that we should be doing. And we know that we should, you know, eat healthier, and exercise more, and get enough sleep, and all of these things, and meditate, and journal. And it’s the actual tangible shift, like making that actual habit is often the most difficult part. So I’m curious if you have any tools for people to make those changes stick, or to really truly commit them into a habit.

Hal: Yeah, a couple of things. Number one is, when I was writing “The Miracle Morning,” that was my biggest insecurity as I was writing is I go, “How am I gonna get people to actually do it?” Right? Because I’m like, because I go, “Everything I’m saying makes sense.” They’re gonna be like, “Yeah, this is good I should do this.” But, you know, I was going, most people have a limiting belief that says, I am not a morning person. That’s the majority of society when surveyed, it’s like 72% I think say, “I’m not a morning person,” it might be higher than that. And I thought, “How am I gonna enter into a conversation that they’ve had in their head for the last, you know, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, their entire lifetime that says, “No, no, I’m officially not a morning person, like been there, done that, tried it, like doesn’t work for me, like, I’m a night owl,” you know. And so that was my biggest insecurity.

So I will just say this. The fact that now well over a million people around the world do “The Miracle Morning” on, you know, an average of like five to six days a week, is evidence that you can do it too, right? I don’t just mean do it being “The Miracle Morning,” but do it being the things that you need to do, and I’m gonna will unpack, you know, to answer your question, kind of how to do that. And there’s a few things, the first and foremost, right? And we talked kind of a lot of what I just talked about with the leaning into it, right? Just start small, put it on paper, right? And “The Miracle Morning” it’s a really great tool to start, and I’m not saying this because I wrote it and I’ll make $1 if you buy it. I’m saying this because I’ve seen this transform so many people’s lives, right? Millions of lives, is that how you start your day sets the tone, the direction, and the context for the rest of the day. In other words, a way I like to put that, and actually this is from Steve Pavlina who I was…I read his book when I was writing “The Miracle Morning.” He said, “If you win the morning, you win the day,” right?

So, most people start their day with a lack of self-discipline and procrastination is how they start it. So meaning, if you hit the snooze button, that is, by default, procrastination, you are procrastinating on starting your day. And, you know, I say in the book, I say it kind of jokingly but seriously, I say, you think about how crazy it is to, you know, we all wanna have this amazing, happy, successful, extraordinary life. But when the alarm goes off in the morning, that is life’s first gift to you, it’s life’s first opportunity and it’s also life’s first challenge. And most people, the alarm goes off and it’s like we’re saying to the universe or to our own being, our own selves, saying, “Yeah, I know I say I want an extraordinary life, but not as much as I wanna lay here unconscious for nine more minutes,” right? And then we hit the snooze button and then it goes off again and you’re like, “Yeah, I wanna be happier and healthier and more successful, but I’d rather lay here for nine more minutes.” And we’re literally giving a message to our subconscious that says, “I don’t have the discipline to get my butt out of bed in the morning, let alone create the extraordinary life that I really want.”

However, if you can change that one habit, and that’s what “The Miracle Morning” I think worked, it’s doing this for so many people and it really is a miracle is, if you can learn how to, and that’s, you know, the book teaches you like, how do you beat the snooze button if you’re not a morning person. And I can give you guys, in fact, let me right now, I don’t wanna keep you like in mystery and make you buy the book, like here’s how. There’s a whole chapter on this in the book, it’s called “The Five Step Snooze-Proof Wake Up Strategy.” And I’ll just give you the most important step.

The most important step is, move your alarm clock across the room. Actually, there’s two, number one is set your intentions before bed. So, before bed, you need to say, “I’m waking up tomorrow at this time, even if I feel tired.” And actually have a…you can actually download, if you go to tmmbook.com, as in “The Miracle Morning” TMM tmmbook.com you can download the “Bedtime Affirmation.” And this is what I used in my own life and then I put it, you know, as a bonus for the book. But it’s word-for-word how to set your intentions the night before so that when you wake up in the morning…when the alarm goes off in the morning, you like jump out of bed and you’re excited. And if you think about any time, Katie, that you were excited to wake up in the morning. Like did you celebrate Christmas growing up for example?

Katie: Yeah, absolutely.

Hal: Okay, so I always when…I’m cautious when I say that because if someone didn’t celebrate Christmas, I don’t wanna, you know, what’s the word I’m looking for? You know, like make you feel left out. So think about like the first day of school, or a vacation, just think of any time in your life when you went to bed like a schoolgirl, right? Or a schoolboy, just excited like, “I can’t wait for the morning,” you know, and for me it was Christmas, you know, as a kid. And, Katie, let me ask you, but was it hard for you to wake up Christmas morning?

Katie: Definitely not. It was hard to stay asleep on Christmas morning.

Hal: Exactly. So I’m guessing you did not snooze on Christmas morning, correct?

Katie: Definitely not.

Hal: So here’s what that shows. That shows that we all have the ability to wake up and jump out of bed. But what was the difference? You had the intention before bed to wake up the next morning with excitement and enthusiasm because there was something you were looking forward to. And when I was not writing “The Miracle Morning” before it was a book, when I was doing “The Miracle Morning” in my own life, I realized I have the ability to wake up excited. I know I do because if there’s ever something I’m excited to wake up for I wake up. But most of us wake up and we’re like, “Oooh” or we go to bed and our intention is the opposite of excitement it’s, “Urgh, I gotta wake up tomorrow at 6 AM and go to work again, and I don’t wanna do that.”

And I went, “I have the ability to wake up excited every day.” But I have to take response-ability to access that ability by creating my own intention before I go to bed of what the morning is going to be like. So, in my mind, in my body, in my emotions, before I go to bed, I set my intention for what I’m going to feel and do when I wake up in the morning. And most people are very unintentional about the morning. They leave the morning up to those first few moments when the alarm goes off, it’s usually on our bedside table, and our level of self-discipline is close to a zero, maybe it’s a one or a two, right? You just reach over you hit the snooze button, you reach over you hit the snooze button.

So the first step is setting your intention before bed. And if you want a map on how…a word-for-word approach on how to do that, go to tmmbook.com you can get the free, you know, thing, the bedtime affirmation. But the second logistical step is you have to move your alarm clock as far across the room as possible. If you can reach it on your bedside table, even if I set my intention, I’ll still usually fail because I turn it off, I hit the snooze button while I’m still half asleep, right? And so, for me, the alarm clock is across the room, it’s actually in my bathroom, which is within hearing distance, you have to able to hear it, but that forces me out of bed, across the room.

So if you do that alone, that starts your day with intention, it starts it with purpose, it starts it with discipline. And now, and then you go do your Miracle Morning. And now you’re, the point of “The Miracle Morning” is really to put yourself in a peak physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual state every day, so that you are at your best. You are, and essentially think of it this way, every day, “The Miracle Morning” ensures that you become a better version of the person you were when you went to bed the night before. And when you start your day like that, it’s hard to not have a great day, like you are on fire and you win the morning and then you’re the best version of yourself to win the day.

So, you know, that, to me is like the linchpin strategy, it’s the one thing you do that affects everything else. And I’ll cut myself off and then, you know, I could talk for an hour on strategies of getting yourself to do the things that you know you need to do that you don’t feel like you have the discipline to do. I mean, we can go a little deeper on that. But first, Katie, any thoughts, questions, or comments on that?

Katie: No, I love that. And I would love to go deeper on that because I think you explain it really well, and what I’ve read of your work. And I think that is the biggest struggle for so many people, because I see people and I’ve done it myself, get in that cycle of like, “You know, I’m gonna start training for a new thing.” And I’m like all about it for three weeks, and then it kind of dies down, or that you eat really clean for three weeks and then it dies down. So how do we maintain that? Like, how do we, even if it’s that thing that so exciting to us, how do we maintain that enthusiasm over the long time?

Hal: So, I’ll tell you an external and an internal strategy. The external strategy I’ll start with which is, accountability. I believe that accountability is arguably one of the, if not the single most determinant factors in taking ourselves to the next level. And if you think about it, you look at the world’s most successful anybody, right? Meaning athletes, CEOs, they all have a high degree of accountability. And it’s a huge factor in their success. You know, show me an athlete, especially as they were younger, you know, growing up, right? Maybe they hit a level of maturity where they don’t need as much accountability of course. But, you know, I don’t think you’ll find an athlete that doesn’t credit their coach. If they didn’t have practice scheduled every day at 3 pm with a coach that would kick their butt off the team if they weren’t there on time, they probably wouldn’t have practiced, they would have been at home playing video games, right?

You know, you look at a CEO, you know, 40 or 50-year-old CEO, if they didn’t have to answer, look at all the accountability in their world. They have stockholders they have to answer to, they have an executive assistant, they have an executive board, they have employees, they have just a general company. And if it wasn’t for all those sources of accountability, they’d probably be screwing off a lot more. But, you know, as they’re screwing off, and they’re watching a YouTube video, and then they go, “Oh, shoot, I’ve got that meeting at 2.” Well, that meeting is a source of accountability that gets them off the YouTube video, or off of, you know, Words With Friends on their phone, and gets them to do the thing they need to do. And if it wasn’t for the source of accountability, they probably wouldn’t do it.

Now, what we have to realize is, why we resist and resent accountability. And once you understand the source of resistance, then you go, “Oh, okay, it is time for us all to grow up,” and I include myself in this, and actually embrace accountability. So you think about this. I believe the reason most human beings resist, resent, and avoid accountability at all costs, is because it was forced upon us as children when our brains were developing. You think about, you know, my parents made sure I ate my vegetables. I didn’t wanna eat my vegetables. If it wasn’t for the accountability from mom and dad, I would not have eaten those vegetables, right? I didn’t wanna take a bath. But they made me take a bath. They held me accountable to take a bath. Most days I didn’t wanna go to school, right? Unless you’re one of those weird kids that loves, my daughter loves school, but I was like, “I don’t wanna go to school,” right? But they got me out of bed, they had to fight me out of bed and I went to school. My teachers held me accountable to turn homework in, and study, and take tests, and so on and so forth.

If it wasn’t for the accountability that was forced upon us by the adults in our lives as kids, I think that most of us would be malnutritioned, uneducated, dirty little kids, right? But what happened was, we didn’t ask for any of that accountability. And whenever nobody was looking, we avoided it, because it was forced on us. And then the problem is, we turn 18 and maybe, you know, you leave the nest, you go off to college, and I don’t know about you, but I ate junk, I was like, “Screw vegetables.” I lived jack-in-the-box. Looking back, I don’t even know how I didn’t have a heart attack at like 20, you know, but I ate jack-in-the-bo…I’m like, “Screw I’m eating whatever I want.” I’m staying up till 2, 3, 4, 5 am playing video games I’m…Like, it was a downward spiral of mediocrity for me.

And if it wasn’t for me finding a mentor at age 19 when I started selling Cutco, and him getting my stuff together, you know, and holding me accountable. And that’s it, I had accountability gifted back into my life. And because of that, I became the person that I am today. I developed discipline, and consistency, and self-belief, and the various attributes of an achiever.

And why did I develop those? Because of accountability, in all fact, I’ll tell you how much accountability I had. The first 10 days when I broke that company record, I didn’t break that company record. I mean, I did, but it was because of my mentor. I had to call him every morning when I woke up at a specific time, I had to call him at 7 am. So I was awake and ready to be on the phone by 7 am. Then I had to call him after every single appointment that I did during those 10 days and let him know how I went. And that was so he can manage my mindset and expectations because I was new to sales and I had a lot of no sales, a lot of disappointment. He would remind me it was okay and keep going and this and that. I had to call him after every single appointment, I had to call at the end of every day.

So, his philosophy was, he wanted to wake me up every morning and he wanted to put me to bed so he could manage my expectations, and that level of accountability. So I did 62 appointments, so I talked to him probably 90 times, at least 90 times, you can imagine making 90 phone calls to someone. And because of that accountability, I broke the all-time company record. Now, I earned it, I was 19 I earned $3,800 during those 10 days, which was a fortune for me, you know, for most people it’s a lot of money, it was an insane amount of money. And who I am, I literally can look back, those 10 days shaped who I am today. And accountability was the number one key to that. And so I would…in fact, we’ll just I mean, we can leave it at that, that’s it.

And in “The Miracle Morning” I talk about that in the book, how important accountability is. I encourage everyone to find an accountability partner. And, if you are wondering, “Well, I’m interested in this, but most of my friends or co, like they’re not into this kind of stuff,” you know, maybe they are maybe they aren’t. The Miracle Morning Community is a Facebook group that I would invite everyone to join. It’s free, we’re not selling anything there. Right now there are 200 and last time I checked 219,000 people from over 100 countries in there. And arguably, you go in there, just scan through the posts, and you will be inspired. It is one of if not the most loving, non-judgmental, supportive, growth-oriented communities on or offline that I have ever seen. Case studies are being done right now about this community.

And you can go in there and let people know what time zone you’re in, and, you know, and that you want an accountability partner. And typically you’ll find one, you know, within an hour, and someone that’s on this journey with you. And when you go in there you find there are people that have been doing “The Miracle Morning” for, you know, over 1,000 days, and there are people that will just like you, it’ll be day one for them. But yeah, it’s great, it’s called The Miracle Morning Community. You can also go to miraclemorning.com and just scroll down, there’s a big picture that says “Join the community.” And, you know, it’ll take you over there. So, either way, you can find it.

Katie: Awesome. I’ll make sure that’s linked in the show notes as well, at wellnessmama.fm. When it comes to a morning routine, do you think that there are specific, like a framework that is pretty much good for everyone? Or are there like different variables that are gonna work better or worse for different people? And if so, how do you identify which things need to be in your own Miracle Morning?

Hal: Yeah, it’s a great question. So, in the book, Chapter 9 out of 10 I think, it’s like one of the last, Chapter 9 is “Customizing The Miracle Morning to fit your lifestyle.” And then Chapter 10 is “The Miracle Morning 30-Day Challenge.” And we could actually, that would, you know, that’s something I could touch on is like, how do you change your behavior? You lean into it, and then you commit to a 30-Day Challenge. Meaning you do it every day, you have someone holding you accountable. And at the end of those 30 days, you’ve acclimated to this new habit, and it could be a habit of getting rid of a bad habit like, you know, quitting soda, or smoking. Or it could be a habit like, you know, adding a morning routine when you’ve never been a morning person.

And again, I mean, you think about, if you’re at all having self-doubt around this because maybe you’ve tried and failed in the past to make changes. You know, there are hundreds of thousands of people in that Facebook group that will tell you, “Hey, I didn’t know I could do it. I didn’t think I could do it. And I did it. And I’m now a morning person,” right?

Customizing it. Yeah. So, yeah, so customizing it. So, the way that I encourage folks, like I’m a very big believer in, A, I don’t know it all. In fact, I know closer to nothing than all, right? I’m a big believer in that I should be a student of life, student of everything. But so I don’t think that I know it all, first of all. Number two, I rarely think there’s a one-size-fit-all for everybody. I don’t think that exists too often.

However, “The Miracle Morning” is made up of six practices, which I mentioned earlier. But let me give you a more memorable framework. This is my brilliant wife, I was writing the book and I go, “Sweetie, I’ve got these six practices. These are like the most timeless personal development practices in the history of humanity. But I need a way to like organize them so people can remember them or they like flow together.” I said, “All these authors are so smart, and, you know, they, Stephen habit has got like “The 7 Habits” oh, sorry, Stephen Covey has got “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and Robert Kiyosaki has got like the “Cashflow Quadrant.” And all these authors are smart enough to create like a framework and I don’t know any way to connect these six practices.” And she goes, “Why don’t you consult a Thesaurus and see if you can arrange some of the wording so it creates an acronym that people can remember.” And I, you know, gave her a big kiss on the lips. I’m like, “You’re so brilliant.” I’m like, “That might work,” right?

And so, meditation became silent, which I actually like because a lot of people like to incorporate prayer into their silence time, right? And journaling became scribing, which, you know, it’s a fancy word for writing, but it created an acronym which could not be more fitting for what the practice is. And the acronym is SAVERS, or I call these the lifesavers, right? But S-A-V-E-R-S, so, the first S is for silence, these are the six practices of “The Miracle Morning” by the way. The first S is for silence, the A is for affirmations, the V is for visualization, the E is for exercise, the R is for reading, and the S is for scribing, right? So those are the SAVERS, and I believe it’s the perfect acronym. Because these literally are the six practices that have proven over centuries, that they can save you, and save me, and save all of us from missing out on the life that we really want, you know, missing out on living to our full potential. So they really are the lifesavers, right? It’s such a fitting acronym.

And what I encourage people to do is, for the 30-Day Challenge, do all six of these, because you don’t fully know the benefits, or if something resonates with you until you actually give it a fighting chance, right? Give it a fair chance. So do all the six of the SAVERS for 30 days.

Now, you can customize the order. And you can even change the order over time. You can experiment and play with these, right? So, give you an example. I start with meditate…I start with silence. Many people, though, and I don’t the percentage, but a lot of people have said, “Hal, gosh, you know, I tried meditating, but then I fall back to sleep.” They go, “I’m not awake enough for it to, you know, like I need to start with exercise.” So they move the E to the front, and they wake up, and they do some stretching, and some yoga, and some jumping jacks, and push-ups, and run, whatever they want, right?

And then in terms of the duration, the SAVERS, the first day I did the savers, I did 10 minutes each, just because it was my first day I thought doing an hour I’ll do 10 minutes each, right? And then that works. I’ve evolved where I usually do 30 minutes of reading, and then I do five minutes of the other SAVERS roughly five to six minutes, I guess is what it would be. But, so I like to read longer. And so I just I meditate for six minutes. I do the other ones for shorter periods of time.

Exercise, I do an app, there’s an app called 7 Minute Workout. And it’s a great app. It’s a full-body workout in seven minutes. In the book, in that chapter, there’s something called the 6-Minute Miracle Morning. And this came about because most of us have an all-or-nothing mentality, which is like, “Oh, I woke up late, or, today I have to leave early so I’ve only got like 10 minutes or 15 minutes. So I guess I’ll skip my Miracle Morning today.”

And one day I had that internal dialogue and I went, “Wait a minute, what if I were to just do one minute of each of the savers? What if I were to sit down and just close my eyes and just meditate and get calm for one minute. And then I pull up my affirmations and I read them for a minute. And then I close my eyes I visualize, you know, my most important priorities being executed flawlessly today for just a minute. And then I jump up and I do a 60 seconds of jumping jacks get my heart rate flowing, get the blood going right for a minute. And I pull out a self-help book that I’m reading, and I just read a page for a minute, and then I journal what I’m grateful for just a minute.”

And I did that that day, and I went, the benefits. It’s like I got 80% of the benefit with 1/10th of the time. And there aren’t too many things you can do with that, you know, get that kind of return on investment, and I went, “This is incredible.” And that’s why I put it in the book, because I go, “Look, I don’t advocate that you do a six-minute every day, you can’t go that deep. But, it just shows that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.” So, the answer to your question is, I would start your first miracle winning 30-Day Challenge. And by the way, most people their 30-day challenge when I give a speech and, you know, people aren’t necessarily reading the book yet. They don’t have, some of them don’t have the book yet. I always say, look, for your first 30 days, just start your challenge by waking up 30 minutes earlier, don’t even go the full hour, just make it easy. Just lean into it, right? Lean into it, 30 minutes earlier, and just do the R, just read, that’s it. It couldn’t be easier. Wake up 30 minutes earlier and just read “The Miracle Morning.”

And then once you get to the chapter on the SAVERS and you start reading about the S, and I teach you a really simple meditation practice, right? Then you can incorporate S and R. And then when you get to the section on, you know, the next day on affirmations, add A, and just lean into it gradually. And then at the end of the 30 days, you can decide what you wanna do. I don’t visualize every day, for whatever reason, visualization has never resonated with me. But I do use it if I’m going to have a specific thing I’m doing, like if I’m giving a speech, I’ll run through a movie in my mind of visualization. But there’s some people in The Miracle Morning Community I often will survey and go, “Which SAVERS do you like better than others, which resonate?” And it blows my mind that some people like visualization is the number one thing that impacts their life and their day. For me it’s affirmations, and some people they go, “Yeah, I don’t jive, I don’t, I struggle with that,” right?

So I always say, for the first 30 days, do all six of the Savers, play with the order, play with the duration of each, and then at the end of 30 days, create your own Miracle Morning. And then while you’re doing, the beauty of it is, “The Miracle Morning” takes a minute to learn, a lifetime to master. Because, you know, meditation I mean, I’ve read, you know, master meditators say that after 10 years of meditating every day, they started to feel like they were getting pretty good at it. Ten years, right? And then after 20 years, they started to feel like they were starting to kind of master it. And then 30 years, they actually mastered it, and I’m like, so each of the SAVERS, you can just, you can play with, you can adjust, you can keep them fresh, you can try new modalities. New affirmations, new methods of visualization, you can do guided meditations, you can do meditation apps, right? So I mean, these are, it’s really this free-flowing ritual that you get to customize and create and add to.

Katie: I love it and I’ll make sure to recap those in the show notes and of course, put a link to the book so people can really dive in.

Katie: Our time has flown by. You’re such an eloquent speaker. A few questions I love to ask at the end. The first being, are there a few things that you feel like people either don’t know or misunderstand about what you teach?

Hal: Yeah, I think that one is the idea that “The Miracle Morning” is about waking up earlier. Now, granted, I mean, A, you may need to wake up earlier depending on if you wake up now at the last minute. Most people wake up because they have to, right? They literally go, “What’s the last minute that I can wake up and not like lose my job, have my children taken away from me, get divorced, right?” I call it your mediocre morning, you know, where you’re like, it’s the last moment I could wake up and not have my life fall apart.

Now, if you’re waking up in that way, then yeah, you need to back up the alarm 30 minutes. But a lot of people wake up and they just, the first, you know, half-hour of their day, or hour of their day is spent just checking Facebook, and scrolling their phone, and checking e-mail. So, it’s really not about waking up earlier as much as it’s about waking up better. It’s waking up and dedicating the first part of your day to elevating your own consciousness, putting yourself in that peak physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual state so you can become a better version of who you were when you went to bed the night before. That’s the first thing, is it? It’s not about, you know, getting up super early. It’s just getting up a little earlier. And the benefits though are so profound that, trust me, it’s worth going to bed 30 minutes earlier if that’s what it takes, right? Thirty minutes less of Netflix at night to have a radical shift in your life is very worth it.

And then the other thing that I would share is that, personal development is not enough. That is actually, my new book that just came out “The Miracle Equation” that’s kind of why I wrote it, is that, I’ve been in the past I’ve been guilty of being what I would call a personal development junkie. And I think a lot of us fall into this trap where, once we learn personal development, we start reading books, and listening to podcasts, and learning all these new ideas, you know, we get excited and we’re like, “Wow, I’m like,” and we start almost our ego can get fed like, “Wow, I like I know more than other people. Other people aren’t reading. All my friends and family aren’t reading these books, and listening to the show, learning this stuff. And they need to, like I’m smarter than they are,” right? So that’s one thing is ego can get, you know, become a part of it. I think when I was younger that was for sure part of my journey.

But just a big part of it is, we actually trick our brain, our subconscious into thinking that learning and growing in and of itself is enough to improve our lives. And while it improves our lives at a certain level, like, you know, if you learn new ways of looking at life, like the things we talk, like the five-minute rule for example, right? That’s like an internal thing that you learn and if you implement it, you start to see that, “Wow, I can be free from my emotional pain, like I don’t need to feel, I don’t need to dwell on things and feel sorry, I can just let them go after five minutes.”

That does change your life, but for the most part, we have to actually change our behavior to change our life. And what the problem is, when you think that just learning is enough to change your life. You know, reading books on finances doesn’t increase your income. Reading books on finances doesn’t increase your savings, right? Reading books on finance or on being healthier doesn’t make you healthier, right? You actually have to change your behavior.

And so while “The Miracle Morning” is arguably one of the most effective practices for personal development, you have to compliment it, you have to follow it up with a process for goal achievement. And that’s what “The Miracle Equation” is, is it’s, okay, you’re learning in the morning, you’re doing your Miracle Morning, you’re growing, you’re evolving, you’re elevating your own consciousness, you’re becoming a better version of yourself. Great. But you can do that and still stay in the comfy confines of your comfort zone, right? Like stay in your house and keep going to work and not doing anything differently. You’ve got to have, “Okay, I need a process. I need a method for getting out of my comfort zone and actually getting clear on defining, clarifying, planning my biggest goals and dreams. And creating a process that will make my success in achieving those goals and dreams inevitable.”

And that is, so that’s, to me, the biggest mistake people make is thinking that the personal development is enough, it’s only half the equation so to speak. And I wrote, “The Miracle Equation” is that is the, “Okay, now, here’s the process for goal achievement that will support your practice that you have for personal development. So you can actually take this growth that you’re experiencing and turn it into a tangible, upgraded reality that creates measurable results in your life.”

Katie: Hmm, such a good point. Secondly, is there a book or a number of books that have drastically changed your life? And if so, what they are and why?

Hal: Yeah, the book that changed my life, probably more than anything is called “Conversations with God.” And it is, you know, I always, the word God is also like miracle, it’s a loaded word. And some people are religious, and some people are spiritual, and some people are atheist. And so, you know, you get a lot of different reactions. I read that book when I was 20 years old, and, by the way, to be very transparent, you know, I grew up Catholic. I then started studying a lot of the world’s religions and just I’m happy to help people, you know, where I kind of my stance on this is. To me, I seek truth and wisdom in all religion in all spiritual practices, even in atheism. Like, to me I try to look at all of it and not think that there’s one right way and that everybody else is wrong, that my way is the right way. And I try to go, “Hey, everyone has their…” You know, I’m looking for truth always and to me like I said I lean toward I know nothing, or I know very little compared to what I can learn. So I’m just trying to learn and grow.

So “Conversation with God” it’s definitely not a religious book. I would say it’s a spiritual book for sure. But, yeah, I read that when I was 20. And, you know, in the author Neale Donald Walsch, just, you know, “Conversation with God” book four which it’s like technically I think he’s written over a dozen books. I’m actually reading book four right now, which is probably why that book is on my mind, you know, that whole series. But yeah, that’s a book that really opened my eyes and I’d encourage you to, you know, to read it with an open mind and consider it. And, yeah, that’s a book that for me was very, very, very impactful in how I live my life and how I view my life, and my purpose in life, and my place in this world, and how I can make the biggest, most positive impact.

Katie: That’s so good. I was actually on my Kindle right now. And I’m about to start reading and I’ll make sure it’s linked in the show notes.

Hal: That’s awesome. That’s so great. Wait, book one or book four?

Katie: The first one.

Hal: Oh, cool. Cool.

Katie: Yeah, excited. Any parting advice or takeaways you wanna make sure we leave with the audience today?

Hal: Yeah. There’s one that I, you know, for me, this has become a major affirmation, which, you know, I won’t go into, I won’t go down that rabbit hole. But I define affirmations as you’ll see in the book very differently than most people do. They’re not woo woo, it’s like really using affirmations to program your mind and your behaviors for success. And the way that, one of my most important affirmations, and this is the parting wisdom I’ll leave you with, is that, you know, as human beings I think that we all, we have trouble creating space in terms of time between where we are and where we want to be. We look at where other people are and we compare ourselves, or we look at where we think we should be or could be and we’re in this place of often scarcity. “Man, why am I not there right now? I wanna be there now.” And it’s, you know, our brain is not very patient, where it goes, “Okay, there’s where I wanna be, hmm, it might take me five years to get there, right? To get there, I need to find this journey and be at peace with where I am, and do something every day to move me close to where I am.” We just look at where we wanna be and go, “Urgh, I’m not there, why am I not there? Why is it taking so long? Why am I not?” You know? And we have these feelings of scarcity and inadequacy.

And so here’s the lesson. And I think that, you know, it probably took me hindsight to learn this and I share this, because I tell people don’t wait for hindsight, don’t suffer for years the way that most people do to get to this place. And here’s the lesson, is that, when we finally get to the place in our lives, when you finally get the place in your life or your business, any area of your life that you’ve been working so hard for, for so long. You’ve been wanting it for so long. You almost never look back and wish it would have happened any sooner.

Instead, when you get to the place that you’ve been working for so hard for so long, in any area of your life or just in your life as a whole, you look back and you go, “Oh, the timing and the journey were perfect. And every obstacle and setback along the way was a necessary part of my evolution to become the person that I needed to be to create the life that I’ve always wanted.” And with that hindsight, with that wisdom, to bring that into your life right now, the lesson is, the applicable lesson is, be at peace with where you are right now on your journey, even if it’s difficult or painful, while you maintain unwavering faith and put forth extraordinary effort to get to where you want to go. And know that when you finally get there, the timing will be perfect.

Katie: That’s a perfect place to put a pin in it for today. But, Hal, thank you so much for being here. I know that you are busy and it’s an honor to chat with you today.

Hal: You’re so welcome, Katie. Thank you for having me on. It’s an honor and you’re a special human being because I felt like that was, everything I talked about was like through me, like you brought out the best in me, the divine. So, yeah, you have some special Mojo, so, thank you.

Katie: Oh, thank you so much. And thanks to all of you for listening and sharing one of your most valuable assets, your time, with both of us today. We’re so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of “The Wellness Mama” podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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285: How to Have a Miracle Morning and Organize Your Day With Hal Elrod

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