Turns out, the way we start our workday may have a lot to do with how satisfying it is to us. Today on the FastCompany.com site, Kevin Purdy writes about how successful people start their days.
The biggest piece of advice? Don't check your email first thing. Do something tangible and satisfying.
Tony Robbins recommends an Hour of Power, Thirty Minutes to Thrive, or at the very least, Fifteen Minutes of Fulfillment. In other words, mindfulness combined with gratitude and some goal fulfillment visualization.
Gina Trapani, among others, advises "eating that frog"--the old Mark Twain saw about how eating a frog first thing in the morning makes everything else in your day not so bad. Translated to, do the thing you're dreading first thing, and nothing else seems as hard.
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark starts his day with customer service and his many volunteer projects; it keeps him real. What a great idea, in an age where finding good customer service could be the new Where's Waldo game. You could adapt that to whatever your work includes; just think about reaching out to people ahead of checking your devices.
Here are other great ideas for starting out right.
Start your day your way--not by responding to the firehose of your inbox, leading to feeling overwhelmed from the start, but by choosing what you do in a way that energizes you.
Whatever that is, how about including a couple of rounds of tapping? You can incorporate gratitude, goal setting, and mindfulness into your EFT, or just enjoy that oasis of calm that tapping brings us.
As part of a group Intro to EFT session, I recently worked with a person who offered up a phobia for our tapping demo. Her particular phobia is toward roaches. This is unfortunate, since she lives on the Texas Gulf Coast where we feature roaches the size of Miatas with wings.
As she described her phobia, she talked about scanning rooms for roaches when she enters them, and feeling jumpy if any roach-like scurrying movement catches her peripheral vision. I asked her if we could tap on the roach resistance, and she concurred. I got her to describe her thoughts as well as her sensations, and she used words like gross and disgusting, and feeling tight in her chest, and "what if one of them flies at me?" as a thought.
In the tapping, I upped the ante a bit by adding in "what if one flies in my hair?" My roach-phobic subject actually pulled her feet off the floor at this one, and crunched her core down defensively. Since I was teaching Intro to EFT, we didn't have time to delve deeply into this phobia. I settled for tapping down her worst reactions and giving her suggestions for continuing to work on it.
I did use the example as an opportunity to teach a tenet of EFT, going back in time to find a core issue. In phobia work, it's often the earliest instance one can remember when something traumatic happened that then developed into a phobia.
Sure enough, my phobic friend shared a memory of being about eight years old and having an unfortunate encounter of the roach kind, including having one fly near her. She hadn't led with this memory, but it was clear that this was where the work needs to be done. I offered to help her with it in the future, if she wishes.
Of all the things EFT is great at, clearing phobias is one place where it shines. Read Rob Nelson's excellent account of using it to clear height phobias in a child and an adult on a camping trip.
Got a phobia? Comment and let us know about it.