When you're young and dumb, You tend to not think about those things. The problem is as you get older, not having good sleep at a younger age ages you much quicker as you get older. And so that's, you know, that's me. I'm raising my hand. That's me being in the military. I mean, it would be nothing to go out to the club till two o 'clock in the morning, get back, get up at 530 and go run three miles. Like that was me in the military. Didn't care. Right. Young and dumb. So. O is optimized sleep. R, here's the big stuff. R, rise with intention. When we wake up in the morning, we need to have intention on what we're doing. And this is the most sacred, protected time of the day that we really have to follow a schedule or we can get derailed so fast it's not even funny. So rise with intention. One thing that science, again, this is all science back. One of the best things you can do in the morning is drink a glass of water immediately after you wake up. Hydrate yourself. Believe it or not, you sweat and you lose your body water while you sleep. So waking up in the morning, drinking a glass of water first thing in the morning is really good. Now I'm not saying it's gotta be eight ounces or 12 ounces, but the first thing I do is I reach over, grab my bottle of water and drink a bunch of it. Helps you start off with some hydration. The next thing you can do is, and this can happen very quickly. is actually have gratitude. When you wake up in the morning, your eyes open, be grateful for waking up. It doesn't have to be amazing. It's just thank you for, you know, I'm gracious or I'm grateful for waking up today. I didn't die in my sleep. It can be that simple. You can look over at your spouse. I'm grateful for my spouse. That'll wake up next to someone I love. You can see your kids. I'm grateful for my kids. Whatever it is, I'm grateful for my bed, my house. I'm just grateful. Wake up being grateful for things. Don't wake up complaining. Okay. Change that. Wake up being grateful. So start with gratitude. And it doesn't have to be three things. It can be one, two, five, whatever. It's just three is like kind of a good number to be grateful for. Next thing is like move. Don't wake up and then lay in bed. Get up right away and start moving. There's a book. by Mel. What's her last name? Mel something. Five, four, three, two, one, right? Like count down from five, four, three, two, one, and then execute. And for her, it started with waking up in the morning. So when you wake your eyes, you just count down five, four, three, two, one, and then you get up. You don't wait any longer than that. Five seconds. Mel Robbins, I think is her name. So gratitude, then movement, stretch, walk, workout. Okay. I like to go to work that workout in the mornings. I go to the gym. I try to wake up at 530. I have been experimenting with different wake up times recently, but 530 is typically when I try to get up, go to the gym, takes me about an hour or so to work out and then come back. And then I will, and again, I'm also experimenting with these and I encourage you to do this too, but then I will either like rest and kind of cool down. I'll have a protein shake in the morning. And then I'll either rest and then get in the shower or I'll come home and immediately get in the shower, take a cold shower, then get out and then rest and drink my shake. One of those combinations. And then after that brief rest, you know, get dressed, start the morning routine of, you know, all the stuff you got to do to get dressed. Right. And then whether you work at home or, you know, whatever, you go to the office, you go to the job site, whatever that is, go do that. Now, I know some guys that wake up super early and they do estimates in the morning. They're doing emails and doing all that stuff. I'm not saying that's wrong, but you should definitely not wake up in the morning and then go instantly into doing emails and work stuff. One of the things you should not do, absolutely, this will change your life. For the first two hours in the morning after you wake up, do not check social media. Do not check emails. Do not check social media. Let your brain wake up. and make sure you don't go instantly into work. So in here, you're also going to, you know, do some whatever, if you do meditations, if you have prayer, if you read the Bible, if you like to read in the mornings, whatever it is, like during this prep time, during the Rise With Intention time, you're doing all of these things to make sure that you are, you know, doing what you need to do to get morning, to get ready for the morning. But do not get on social media. Do not check emails. It will suck you in. And the next thing you know, you wasted 30 minutes or an hour. All it takes is one notification on your phone that says email from client. You're like, I'll just check this real quick before I get in the shower. You open the email and it's a blast. Hey, Brad, I just got home, saw all the work the guys did. This is ridiculous. We got to have a talk right now. First thing in the morning, I want you at my house by 730 and do this. And we got to solve this problems. And then what do you do? You're just like freaking out. You just blew the whole morning out. You're jumping in the shower. What's going on? What could it possibly be? I talked to the guys and then now your morning's ruined because you just had to click on that notification. Guys, your clients can wait. Your clients can wait until you get to the office. I promise you. There's nothing on earth that is that important. They can wait. I'm just going to get on the Facebook real quick and check that notification. Guys, turn off the notifications to your phone. If you get an actual dean, you know, a pop-up or a ding, turn that crap off. You know how to go in and check for notifications. You're not gonna miss anything, I promise you. Turn that crap off until, or at least until like you get to the office. Let's say your start time is 7.30, then don't have that stuff come on until 7.30. Put your phone on sleep mode until 7.30. Whatever it takes, you have to be in combat mode. You have to combat against all distractions in the morning. You have to do this, guys. You have to. So make sure you're distracting yourself from that. And then the E is energize your body and mind. Now, again, the orders of these things is not that important. It's just a cool acronym, CORE, and those are just to help you remind yourself. But E is energize body and mind. So that can be fuel with protein or healthy fats, not sugar bombs. Don't eat those iced honey buns in the morning in a Mountain Dew like I did for many years. Feed your mind with positive input. Like I said, the Bible, book, podcast, whatever it is. If you go to the gym, throw a podcast on, throw on the audio book. Don't waste that time listening to music unless you just need to have music to work out, whatever. But use that time to double dip, call it net time, no extra time to fuel your mind, right? If you do affirmations, that's fine. Do that. If you like to reflect on things, you know, prayer, meditate, do that stuff. Do these things in the morning before you start your actual day. And while you're doing this, before you start your day, write down or review your three priorities for the day. What are the top three things I need to get done today? It's going to help you stay focused on those things and then not get derailed by something else that comes in, you know, once you do that. Now, this is really just for the morning. I like to extend my morning routine until like the first hour of work where I have very specific routine that I go through. The first thing I do when I log in in the morning, when I sit down at my desk, as far as work-wise, is to check my bank account. I go into my accounting software. I look at all the transactions from the previous day, approve them, categorize them. I look at my P &L every single day. I look, compare it to last year, see where I'm slow on, see where I'm doing well on. What's the difference comparable to last year? So I start my day knowing financially where my business is. Is it doing well? Is it struggling? Do I need to increase? Do I need to focus on certain things to generate revenue? What is it that's going on? Am I going to have a bunch of expenses coming out that I need to make sure I cover for every day? That's the very first thing. And by the way, a little secret hack, my Chrome browser, I have tabs of everything that I need to do in my morning routine. And I have them in an order in a way so that the first thing I do is on the right side, if I'm looking at my screen, it's the tab on the far right. And so as I finish that, I close that browser out. So the first thing I do, check my accounting software, check my P &L, close that browser out. What's next? I need to approve. any video edits that my video editor does every day. I check them. I go in there. If there's nothing to approve, fine. I delete it. If there's things to approve, I go through, I watch them, make comments, whatever, send it to her, close that out, right? And I go through these things. And then I check emails, respond to any emails that I need to do, you know, go through, clean out my box. I like to try and keep it as empty as humanly possible, although that's not always the case. Like right now, I probably have 30 emails in there that need to be gone through. But on a regular average, I only have like three or five emails that are in there. I don't have hundreds of emails. I go through every day and clean them out. Spams, delete them. Anything that's important either gets put into categories and I follow up with them later when appropriate or, you know, I delete them or whatever, archive or whatever it might be. By the way, this is not part of the core four, but this is what intentional, This is what living life with intention looks like. I spent the time to categorize emails and set up folders or labels so that things go in certain places. I have filters so that if an email from a certain thing comes, it goes into a certain label. I spent the time to set that up. Are you hearing me? I spent the time to set up these systems to make my life easier. I don't just open up an email. and have no end systems, and it's just complete chaos, and I have a notification with 500 emails, and I don't know where shit is, and I spend three hours trying to find one email from a client I know they sent me last week, and I can't find it. You have to live life with intention. You have to run your business with intention. That's why rise with intention. Make sure you run your business with intention. You have to do this, okay? Or you can just be chaotic all the time. You can live in chaos. That's up to you. So that's the main thing. That's the core four, okay? Cut off distractions, optimize sleep, rise with intention, energize body and mind. If you do these things every day, don't deviate as much as possible. You will see a significant difference in your energy levels, your routine, all that stuff. So my challenge for you guys is to try this for seven days straight. Try to do this for seven days where you go to bed at the exact same time. You kind of have a routine and then you execute on it. Now, some of you are like in the middle of trying different things. So like maybe you're not exercising right now, but you want to start exercising in the mornings. There's going to be an adjustment period. It's going to take you weeks to figure that out. But whatever that is, I'm not saying you have to start exercising. I'm saying pick a schedule, stick to it, do these core fourth activities, and you will see a significant difference. So that's my challenge for you is to do this. Now, I'm going to put together, I sort of have it done already, but by the time this podcast drops, I will have a little cheat sheet that you can download for free and just to have kind of help you focus on these four areas, the core four, and make sure that you can track your progress. Okay, so I'll have that ready for you. I believe, and I don't really have it figured out the best way to get it to you. But I believe the easiest thing is going to be if you, and we'll put a link in the show notes too, by the way. We'll just have a link that you can just get to it. But let's say you're listening somewhere and you don't have access to it, whatever. You can just email me, probably be the easiest. Or you can text me, but you can email info, I-N-F-O at hammerandgrind. com. Or you can text to 812-405-4610. If you just text or email and then just put in the subject or in the text, just say core four worksheet, then I'll know what you're looking for. And then we can send that to you. Okay. We'll have a link in the show notes, but you can also text or email and just put core four worksheet and I'll know what you mean. I'll send that to you. It's free to, you know, something, it's just a one page document. That's just going to help you to kind of focus on these things. But that's my challenge. My challenge is to do it for seven days. At the end of seven days, I want you to share your results with me. I want you to message me on socials, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, wherever you watch this or read this or hear it on the blog, whatever. Just message me and let me know how it worked out for you. Again, you can email me or text me to the same number or email. Just let me know, hey, I did the core four for seven days and this is the result that I had. So let me know how it goes. Guys, this is so important to make sure you win the day. Stop reacting to everything that goes on. Stop living your life with terrible, terrible habits and routines. For the love of God, take the TV out of your bedroom. You do not need a TV in your bedroom. I promise you. It's one of the best decisions I ever made in my life was getting rid of the TV in our bedroom. For many years, we had one TV in our house. My kids do not have TVs in their room. We don't have a TV in our room. We had one TV in our family room for many, many years, and then we added a second TV in the living room. So we have two TVs in the house. That's it. And they hardly ever get watched because we don't watch that much TV. But take the stinking TV out of your bedroom, guys. Seriously. No, you don't need it to go to sleep at night. That's dumb. Change your habits, okay? Get a white noise machine or do something else. But you don't need the TV on to help you go to sleep at night. All right, I'll get off my soapbox here. I digress. Guys, try this out. See what goes on. Let me know your thoughts, and then we'll go from there. It's going to change your life, I promise you. If you just try it for seven days and then continue doing it, you will see a significant difference in your life. This might be an awesome time for you to start developing healthy habits, eating better, quit eating junk food. It's probably going to require you to go to bed earlier. Oh my gosh, boohoo. And get up earlier and work out and do some things. But your life will be much better. I promise you. Thanks for hanging out with me, guys. You know where to find me on the socials, Hammer Grind Podcast. You can go to the show notes or just search on any social media platform for the Hammer Grind Podcast. And remember, until next time, profit is not a dirty word.
