The Life S.A.V.E.R.S. for Entrepreneurs
The Life S.A.V.E.R.S. are simple but profoundly effective daily morning practices that are virtually guaranteed to enable you to become more so that you can fulfill your potential.
The Life S.A.V.E.R.S. are:
- S ilence
- A ffirmations
- V isualization
- E xercise
- R eading
- S cribing
Leveraging these six practices is how you will accelerate your personal development during your newfound Miracle Morning ritual.
S is for Silence
Most entrepreneurs start the day by checking email, texts, and the current day’s business numbers on their smart phones. And most entrepreneurs struggle to build their businesses. It’s not a coincidence. Starting each day with a period of Silence instead will immediately reduce your stress levels and help you begin the day with the kind of calm clarity that you need to focus on what’s most important.
Many of the most successful entrepreneurs, and high achievers across all professions, are daily practitioners of silence. It’s not surprising that Oprah practices meditation—and that she does nearly all the other Life S.A.V.E.R.S. Musician Katy Perry practices transcendental meditation as do Sheryl Crow and Sir Paul McCartney. Film and television stars Jennifer Aniston, Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Seinfeld, Howard Stern, Cameron Diaz, Clint Eastwood, and Hugh Jackman have all spoken of their daily meditation practices. Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons meditates with his two daughters every morning for 20 minutes. Even famous billionaires Ray Dalio and Rupert Murdoch have attributed their financial success to the daily practice of stillness. You’ll be in good (and quiet) company by doing the same.
In no particular order, here are a few to get you started:
- Meditation
- Prayer
- Reflection
- Deep breathing
- Gratitude
Whichever you choose, be sure you don’t stay in bed for your period of silence, and better still, get out of your bedroom altogether.
A is for Affirmations
Science has proven that affirmations—when done correctly —are one of the most effective tools for reprogramming your subconscious mind and quickly becoming the person you need to be to achieve everything you want in your life—for yourself, your business, and your relationships. And yet, affirmations also have a bad rap. Many of us have tried them, only to be disappointed with little or no results. You can, however, leverage affirmations in a way that will absolutely produce results for you. I’ll show you how.
By repeatedly articulating and reinforcing to yourself what result you want to accomplish, why accomplishing it is important to you, which specific actions are required to produce that result, and, most importantly, precisely when you commit to taking those actions, your subconscious mind will shift your beliefs and behavior. You’ll begin to automatically believe and act in new ways and eventually manifest your affirmations into your reality.
Step #1 The Ideal Result You Are Committed to and Why
Examples: I am committed to doubling my income in the next 12 months, from $_______ to $_______, so that I can provide financial security for my family.
Step #2 The Necessary Actions You Are Committed to Taking and When
Examples: To ensure that I double my revenue & profit, I am committed to doubling my daily prospecting calls (from 20 to 40 calls) five days a week, between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m.—NO MATTER WHAT.
Step #3 Recite Your Affirmations Every Morning with Emotion
Schedule time each day to read your affirmations during your Miracle Morning to program your subconscious and focus your conscious mind on what’s most important to you and what you are committed to doing to make it your reality. That
Step #4 Constantly Update and Evolve Your Affirmations
As you continue to grow, improve, and evolve, so should your affirmations. When you come up with a new goal, dream, or any extraordinary result that you want to create for your life, add it to your affirmations.
V is for Visualization
Visualization has long been a well-known practice of world-class athletes who use it to optimize their performance. Olympic athletes and top performers in many sports incorporate visualization as a critical part of their daily training. What is less well known is that the top achievers among successful entrepreneurs use it just as frequently.
Visualization is a technique by which you use your imagination to create a compelling picture of your future, providing you with heightened clarity and producing the motivation that will assist you in making your vision a reality.
What do you really want? Forget about logic, limits, and being practical. If you could reach any heights, personally and professionally, what would that look like? Involve all your senses to maximize effectiveness. See, hear, touch, taste, and smell every detail of your vision. The more vivid you make your vision, the more compelled you’ll be to take the necessary actions to make it a reality.
E is for Exercise
Even a few minutes of exercise each day significantly enhances your health, improves your self-confidence and emotional well-being, and enables you to think better and concentrate longer. You’ll also notice how quickly your energy increases with daily exercise, and the people you spend the most time with will notice it too.
You can go for a walk or run, hit the gym, throw on a P90X or Insanity DVD, follow the movements on a yoga video on YouTube, or find a Life S.A.V.E.R.S. buddy to play some early morning racquetball. There’s also an excellent app called 7 Minute Workout that gives you a full-body workout in—you guessed it—seven minutes
There’s no excuse not to do it. The choice is yours—just pick one and do it.
As an entrepreneur, you are on the go. You need an endless reserve of energy to capitalize on all the opportunities coming your way, and a daily morning exercise practice is going to provide it.
R is for Reading
As entrepreneurs, we know that one of the fastest ways to achieve the result that we want, is to find successful people to be our role models. For every goal you have, there’s a good chance an expert out there has already achieved the same thing or something similar. As Tony Robbins says, “success leaves clues.”
Fortunately, some of the best of the best have shared their stories in writing. And that means all those success blueprints are just waiting for anyone willing to invest the time in reading. Books are a limitless supply of help and mentorship right at your fingertips.
As for some of Hal’s favorite books related to entrepreneurship, here’s a short list:
- Scale: Seven Proven Principles to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back by Jeff Hoffman and David Finkel
- Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham
- Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel
- The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
- Ask: The Counterintuitive Online Method to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy … Create a Mass of Raving Fans … and Take Any Business to the Next Level by Ryan Levesque
- The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
- Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
Books don’t have to be read cover to cover, nor do they have to be finished. Remember that this is your reading time. Use the table of contents to make sure you read the parts you care about most, and don’t hesitate to put it down and move to another book if you aren’t enjoying it or gaining value from it. You have too many options for incredible information to spend time on the mediocre.
Also, Audiobooks count as reading!
S is for Scribing
Scribing is simply another word for writing. Most Miracle Morning practitioners scribe in a journal, for five to ten minutes, during their Miracle Morning. By getting your thoughts out of your head and putting them in writing, you’ll immediately gain heightened awareness, clarity, and valuable insights that you’d otherwise be oblivious to.
As Tony Robbins has said many times, “A life worth living is a life worth recording.”
Also a great practice to add to your routine is to write what you appreciate about different aspects of your business. When we write down the things we appreciate about our team and their performance, for example, even (and particularly) when we feel less than wonderful about it, it’s easier to focus and capitalize on what’s going well. The practice of recording appreciations helps you focus on the positive, which will help you stay flexible and solution focused even when circumstances are challenging.
What you appreciate … APPRECIATES.
