Written By: Kailey Whipple

Start your day like a boss with these 5 simple steps

When you are a new entrepreneur, you need a new way to start every day.

You need to nurture your motivation to serve your customers and develop your drive to reach your goals. You also need to stay focused, balanced, and healthy so that you can power through when you hit bumps in the road.

If you own a business, you need a powerful morning routine.

The most successful entrepreneurs start their days with a routine that combines elements of self-care and self-improvement to stay grounded, focused, and motivated. Here’s how you can, too!

Benefits of a Consistent Morning Routine

A morning routine has been vital to my personal growth over the past few years. And it’s helped me see monumental shifts in my mindset and overall wellness. Personally, a morning routine has been beneficial to my health, focus, and confidence.

But my business hasn’t seen the most significant impact from having a morning routine – it’s seen the most impact from sticking to my morning routine. 

Every day, I know that I can tackle anything that happens in my business – because I’ve prepared myself personally.

After all, as an entrepreneur, your overall wellness determines the wellness and success of your business.

These are the benefits you’ll see when you stick to a consistent morning routine:

• You are more productive
• You are less worried and less stressed
• You see improvements in your overall health 
• You notice how quickly you achieve your goals 
• You appreciate your life, your business, and your relationships more
• You experience less of the entrepreneurial “rollercoaster” 

All of these things happen when you stick to a consistent morning routine that prioritizes your mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing. 

How to Design Your Powerful Morning Routine

There are five components that make up a perfect morning routine that will holistically support you as a whole person with a mind, body, and spirit.

Doing one or another might feel weird at first, but remember that anything can feel strange the first time you do it. Then it gets easier, and soon it’s a natural habit. 

Below are the only 5 steps you need to create a powerful morning routine that sets you up for success every day. If you follow these steps, you’ll find yourself a whole different person – a more confident, calm, and grateful one – in no time.

Here are the 5 steps to creating a perfect morning routine:

Step 1: Hydrate Your Brain & Body

As an entrepreneur, your business relies on your ideas, your mind, and your ability to think critically through business problems. 

You could argue that your entrepreneur brain is your biggest asset – so you need to take care of it every day. That starts with staying hydrated. 

While you sleep each night you lose around 33 ounces (or one liter) of water.1  When you wake up in the morning, that water needs to be replaced as soon as possible to help you function optimally throughout the rest of the day.

When you start your day dehydrated, you set off a cascade of other inconvenient issues that will make your day difficult. Mainly, when you’re dehydrated your brain cells stop functioning properly, and have to work harder to do basic things.2 

The best way to keep your brain sharp is to drink a whole glass of pure water right when you wake up. I usually leave a jar with a lid on it next to my bed so that it’s ready for me. That way, I don’t even have to leave my bed to start my morning routine.

A word of advice – drink water before you drink your morning coffee or tea. Caffeine is a diuretic and can dehydrate you even further if you start your day with it first. And make sure to drink plenty of water for the rest of the day so you’re supporting your greatest asset – all the time.

Step 2: Practice Mindfulness

Another way to keep your brain healthy is by practicing mindfulness.

Mindfulness should come early in your morning routine – either first or second on your checklist. It’s much easier to practice focusing your attention right after you wake up and you aren’t yet distracted by work, family demands, or any other thoughts, worries, or ideas.  

A very simple way to start practicing mindfulness in the morning is to notice the sounds you hear when you wake up. You can practice shifting your attention from the sounds furthest away from you to the sounds closer to you, then to your breath – and back out again. 

When researchers from various medical schools studied the effect of mindfulness-based therapy on individuals who were generally healthy, they found that the long-term practice of mindfulness-based stress reduction actually improved the individuals’ levels of psychological well being.3

I’ve seen this in my individual practice, and in discussions I’ve had with other entrepreneurs who swear by a regular mindfulness or meditation practice. 

A regular mindfulness practice that helps you focus on the present moment rather than on future worries or past regrets can help you experience more joy, happiness, and a greater sense of fulfillment.

As an entrepreneur and the boss of your business, those qualities are vital to getting through the stressful days of growing your business, handling rejections, and managing multitudes of tasks.

Step 3: Write Down Your Thoughts

It’s vital for entrepreneurs to write down their goals, dreams, and ideas to stay focused every day on doing the next right thing to move their business forward. 

Running a business often feels like you’re being pulled in a thousand directions, but writing helps you feel less overwhelmed and more in control. It’s one of the most powerful ways to start the day like a boss. 

The magic of writing is that it solidifies your thoughts. It literally takes the effervescence of your ideas out of your mind and turns them into matter through ink and paper. 

That’s a powerful tool that we have as humans – to turn ideas into physical reality.

To design your most powerful morning routine, make time every morning to write down your thoughts, ideas, affirmations, goals, and dreams. 

My best advice for the writing element of your morning routine? Any time you have a negative or self-limiting thought that comes out on paper, write a counteracting, positive, or unlimited phrase next to it to help shift yourself into a confidence mindset. 

You don’t have to believe what you write down right away. But seeing it there will allow your mind to start thinking about solutions and positive outcomes. An example of this is: 

“I’m really nervous about today’s client call.”

“I am excited for the opportunity to serve another entrepreneur with my talent and skills.”

I like to write in a journal, but I also write my affirmations and my goals on a whiteboard on my desk. This helps me stay positive, laser-focused, and confident all day.

Step 4: Move Your Body

The beauty of being an entrepreneur in today’s world is that you can run your entire business from your laptop. The downside to that is you’re sitting in a chair all day, staring at a computer screen.

In 2018, researchers from Australia, the United States, and the Netherlands observed twenty people who were asked to sit in a chair for two hours. They concluded that not only is sitting all day uncomfortable for people, but it can also affect how your brain functions.4

And it’s well known that regular exercise helps improve your cognitive function, or how well your brain works. In fact, one study stated that physical exercise has “enormous benefits” for your brain.5 

To combat the negative effects of sitting most of the day, add an element of movement to your morning routine.

Regular exercise improves your physical stamina and your mental discipline – both of which you need as an entrepreneur and business owner. 

You never know when you’ll need to push through physically or mentally exhausting entrepreneurial experiences. With a daily habit of movement added to your morning routine, you’ll be better prepared whenever the long, grueling days happen.

Your movement doesn’t need to be a 5 am military-style boot camp. It can be something as simple as gentle yoga and stretching. It could be a solo run or running with a local group. It can be a morning stroll around the block or a vigorous walk for a longer distance. 

I’ll confess something here – my morning movement isn’t always what you’d call “exercise”. Sometimes I have a solo 6 am dance party, and sometimes I clean my house! 

Whatever you do, make it fun so that you stay consistent.

Step 5: Read Something New

You certainly have many qualities and characteristics that differentiate you as an entrepreneur from your competitors. There’s one simple way to make that differentiation even more dramatic: read daily.

Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, and other power-house entrepreneurs and business owners are known to be voracious readers. They read every day and they make it a priority to consume knowledge through reading.

If you want to set yourself apart from other entrepreneurs and business owners, reading needs to become a part of your morning routine, too.

Here’s the best part: you don’t have to only read books about business to set yourself apart. 

When you read something new, you learn something new. And when you learn, your brain creates new neural connections or pathways which actually change your perspective on the world. 

This is why your library doesn’t need to consist of purely business books. You can read anything new, about any subject, and create new connections in your brain. 

Your new knowledge may spark an idea or a better understanding of your customers or their problems. 

Typically, I will alternate between three types of books. When I finish a business book, I will read a novel or a classic story. After that, I’ll read a book about psychology, or some other health and wellness topic that I’m interested in. Then, I’ll go back to reading a business book.

Sometimes I have two books in progress at once, especially if one is about a particularly complicated topic. This helps me get through the text since I can give my brain a break from the complexity. 

Right now, I’m re-reading “The Universe in a Single Atom” by the Dalai Lama, and “Slight Edge” by Jeff Olson – one of Sarah Turner’s favorite books.

Reading is a highly valuable use of your time and must be part of your morning routine if you want to start your day like a boss. You never know when it could spark your next genius idea.

The Most Successful Entrepreneurs Perfect their Morning Routine This Way

When combined, the 5 elements listed above create a perfect morning routine that’s guaranteed to help you make powerful shifts, personally and professionally.

But there’s one more thing that you need to create a morning routine that paves your road to success.

You must be consistent.

Let me tell you why. In my second year of playing high school tennis, we got a new coach.

She was almost a foot shorter than me, wore glasses as thick as the cream in a double-stuffed Oreo, and was so muscular that we all swore she went to bodybuilding competitions.

The prior year’s practices were made up of mostly mock-matches against our teammates. And we didn’t have a great year. We won a total of 3 out of the 20+ matches we played. 

That tennis season ended early, to say the least. 

Our former coach was always telling us we needed to play more games. So that’s what we did. But we still couldn’t win matches, no matter how many mock games we played.

When Coach Abe took over, it was completely different. We rarely played mock matches against each other. 

Instead, we ran drills. Every day after school, we would run 2 hours of drills. We practiced moving our feet, hitting the ball, serving, smashing, and swinging. 

If we hit the ball perfectly, she would say, “Do it again!” 

If we hit the ball imperfectly, she would yell, “CON-SIS-TEN-CY! WE ARE LOOKING FOR CON-SIS-TEN-CY LADIES!” 

To this day, I can hear her yelling “CON-SIS-TEN-CY!” across the tennis court, her call echoing across time into my home office.

Her voice has stuck with me for so long because it’s a lesson that’s vital to success in all areas of life. Whenever I’m wondering what’s “wrong” with a situation, Coach Abe’s voice bubbles up in the back of my mind and I can see her tiny, dense frame shouting for me to keep doing the right things I was doing. 

As my tennis team and I became more consistent, we started winning more games. Then we won matches. And that year, we made it to regionals, where my doubles partner and I took first place

When you master your mornings through consistency, you master your physical, mental, and spiritual wellness, and you can master the rest of your daily activities.

My Morning Routine Helped Me Write My Way to Freedom

My copywriting business is not my first entrepreneurial rodeo. I’ve been an online entrepreneur for the past 5 years. But I didn’t always start my days with such a powerful morning routine.

When I started my first business in 2015, I’d wake up at 5am and immediately check my email. My days were one hundred percent about work, and I did everything on my own through trial and error. And yes, it all caught up to me.

Eventually, I was so burned out that I got physically sick. I had to shut the business down and get a full-time job.

There’s nothing wrong with a consistent paycheck. But this time, when the entrepreneurial itch came back, I knew I had to do things differently to avoid crashing again.

What was different this time around is that I had the support and the validation that Sarah provides in her course. 

When I got to the module where she talks about designing and sticking to a personal morning routine, I knew I had chosen the right path and the right teacher, at the right time.

Right now, you can sign up for a free mini-course to see the exact steps you need to take to start and run your own copywriting business like a boss.