FEEL GOOD MORNINGS

EP #14



“Do I need a life coach?” You’re listening to Episode 14, with Rhiannon Bush



Welcome to the Do I need a life coach? Podcast. We’re here to discuss the ins- and outs- of the life coaching industry and give you tools to use, to see for yourself. I’m your host, Rhiannon Bush. Mother, management consultant and a passionate, certified life coach.



How do you wake up? Are you a good sleeper? A bad sleeper? A light sleeper? A sleep walker?



Do you wake up feeling energized or lethargic?



It occurred to me this morning on our way to drop the kids at daycare just how much we can choose to stay the same, morning after morning, and re-live that same morning over and over again, or we can make a change, quite easily to change our entire experience.



A few years ago I was going through a bit of an identity crisis and couldn’t work out what had changed in my day. On one of my usual morning walks, I changed the podcast I wasn’t really into, over to my Spotify account. I clicked on ‘Liked songs’ instead of my usual go-to-in-the-car playlist and Bent by Matchbox 20 came on. Showing my age now but I’m a huge Matchbox 20 fan, absolutely love their music and it was the music I listened to a lot in high school. I’m sure you have an equivalent right, but one of the many things I love about music is that it transports me directly back to memories I’ve had throughout my life and makes me feel all sorts of things. It’s why I often choose to listen to books before I read them. I’ll listen to the audiobook and if I enjoy it, I’ll buy the physical book. Then as I’m ear-marking the physical book I’ll mentally be taken back to where I was physically when listening to that part of the book. Isn’t it great how our brain works like that huh?! In coaching, we call it anchoring. Super powerful stuff, very helpful for altering meanings we’ve given things so our clients can move forward and detach but I’ll go into that later.



So here I was, Matchbox 20 came on and I got all nostalgic but the lightbulb went off in my mind that I used to listen to music every single morning on the bus on the way to school. Then in Sydney when I was commuting to and from wherever I was going, I had my headphones on and was listening to music. Music was and always has been a huge part of my life but I’d left it behind, somewhere along the way. It was what I turned to to release pent-up emotions, it’s how I set-up my day, wound down from my day, felt like I wasn’t alone and connected. Music has always given me so much. So at this time in my life, on my morning walk, I realise that’s a huge piece of what’s been missing and making me feel a little left-of-centre. A little unlike my normal self.



And in the car in the mornings on our way to drop off, we get to go as a family which I love, we put on crazy fun music. My son loves ‘I like to move it’ from Madagascar, my daughter loves Purple Hat (she’s 18 months old by the way, but she loves it) and I found this playlist of all the dance/party songs Damien and I listened to in our early 20s. Needless to say, we bounced into daycare, laughing, joking, playing… and while it made the goodbyes harder, our energy levels were up, vibrations raised and we were all feeling fabulous. Which, considering we’d had to wake both kids up, shovel breakfast into them and race out the door, on a Tuesday, definitely wasn’t the norm. But it was super fun.



And that’s the choice. That’s where we’re at and can make a slight change. For you, it may not be music. It may be exercise, or great food, or meditation. It may be having an orgasm. It may be going for a swim in the ocean, even if it’s in the middle of winter.



Somebody once told me that we get each day, just once. As in, it is never going to be the date it is today, ever again. And I found that a little scary. A little exciting. It definitely made me stop and contemplate life a little differently because it’s true. And while life is to be enjoyed and we have responsibilities we need to honour for work or whatever else, if you’ve seen the sun rise or set you’ll know that each day moves quickly.



Those first few decisions you make each morning are important ones. They can influence your entire day. They help you manage your state – as in keep your composure, keep a level head, make sound decisions. They keep your energy up around the time your parasympathetic nervous system is doing its thing.



I’ve been reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. Brilliant book, I highly recommend it. And it talks extensively about… you guessed it… habits. Haha. But seriously it gives really simple-to-use frameworks to help you identify your current habits. What do you do in the morning? Wake-up, check your phone, go to the toilet, eat breakfast, jump in the shower, brush your teeth, etc. He also provides a rating scale to assess whether those habits move you towards or away from what it is you want for yourself. It’s great.



The reason this is important, is because, especially if you’re somebody who wakes up tired, it means you’re not alert, you’re not aware, you’re not focused. So your morning routine will most likely be verging on subconscious. If that’s the case, you go on autopilot to get yourself out the door and off to work. Autopilot means a lack of awareness around your actions, it’s the path of least resistance which is what our brain’s primary motive is – to conserve as much energy as possible, and with that lack of awareness, will be an inability to change it.



I should’ve mentioned if you don’t care to change your morning routine, you can apply this to another time in your day or area of your life. I like to feel good in the morning. I like to feel energized and like I’m going to attack the day and achieve great things. In saying that I’m a morning person – you can probably tell, but it means I want to set myself up as best I can, early on, to have high energy levels, to feel good and to optimize my day. I want to achieve as much as possible and feel great doing it.



If that’s you too, here’s step 1: Document your current routine. Doing it on paper will enable you to see it out of your head (obviously) and somewhat objectively assess it. Use the Atomic Frameworks habit scorecard to then work out whether each of those habits you have in your morning routine are positive, neutral or negative. And just start with a section of your day – like from the moment you wake, to the moment you leave your house or something like that. Start small.



Step 2: spend some time really thinking about what lights your soul on fire. As I mentioned, for me, it’s music. What is it for you? The simpler and easier the better – i.e. if it’s running a marathon, you’ll have to get up pretty early to do that before work. Not that that should be a deterrent, but if you can choose something that’s simple and easy, you’ll be more likely to implement it because of that path-of-least-resistance thing I mentioned earlier. Mel Robbins talks about the 5 second rule – her TED talk is awesome, highly recommended but she talks about the 5 second rule as a way to get out of bed in the morning, really cool stuff. Yoga, meditation, etc.



Step 3: When you’ve got a list of say 3-4 things that you know make you feel awesome in an instant, find ways of bringing that into your routine. Where and how. For instance, I have my Spotify playlist on my phone that I found. My phone is connected to my car. I have to remember to pop it on when I jump in the car. When I was living in Melbourne I would ride my bike to the gym and then ride my bike to work. Riding my bike made me feel awesome, the gym made me feel awesome, the music at the gym made me feel awesome. It was a triple whammy. Now if I get two of those three into my morning, great but we’re trying to do this in a non-pressurised, enjoyable, path-of-least-resistance way so let’s keep things really simple right now. Pick one on your list to start with. Pick where in your morning routine you’re going to bring this in.



Step 4: Find a trigger to remind yourself to do it. The thing about routines and auto-pilot is that we coast and aren’t present and in the moment. So often, we’ll arrive at our destination and be like “ohh I was going to do x” and then some people, like one of my recent clients, will use that to spark her negative self-talk and give herself a hard time. Not nice. By finding a trigger, we make it super obvious which puts our change in routine front-of-mind. I remember a client I was coaching wanted to lose weight and so she wanted to start brushing her teeth immediately after dinner as a way to minimizing her after-dinner picking. She put a bright yellow giraffe on the kitchen counter near the sink, which didn’t belong there and got in the way of washing up. So she would go to put it away and where she had to put it away, she would be reminded to go straight into the bathroom and brush her teeth. Trigger. Choose a trigger and make it blaringly obvious.



Step 5: Put your change to the test! Get up and try it. And not just for one day, try it for 5 to start with. See what happens. By the way, nothing may happen. It may have little or no impact on you at all…. But I doubt it! So give it a red-hot crack and commit to the change for a certain number of days. Say 5.



The most important thing to gauge is the change. Not whether it was mind-blowing or completely revolutionary. All you have to do is calibrate the difference. Was there a difference in how you felt at the end of each day, or in what you achieved, or in some other criteria as established by you (because these are you rules remember) that made the effort to implement the change, worth it? If the answer is yes, you’ve made a great change. Well done. If the answer is no, maybe a different change is required, maybe the lights your soul on fire criteria wasn’t strong or easy enough.



Repeat the 5 steps:

Document your current routine

Really discover what lights your soul on fire

Locate when your “feel-awesome-in-an-instant” can come into your routine

Choose a Trigger to help you make the change

Test it and calibrate





James Clear says "If you can get 1% better each day for one year, you'll end up 37 times better by the time you're done." "It is only when looking back 2, 5, or 10 years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones become strikingly apparent."



So keep going. Keep persisting. I believe in you.









Hey! Before you go, I always find reviews really helpful when looking for new information or insights…



I you’ve found this podcast valuable, please take a minute to write a quick review about what you’ve found most beneficial for you, so other people can benefit from your insights, and listen in too. I would LOVE that!

Also, if there are any topics you’d like me to cover specifically about life coaching or the life coaching industry, visit rhiannonbush.com to contact me. Thanks for joining and I’ll see you in the next episode of Do I Need A Life Coach?!


Please note, this transcription may not be exact.