‘Execution is the missing link between aspirations and results’ – Larry Bossidy Ram Charan
Following our workshops, delegates leave with a great desire to implement the core course concepts. However, they often find executing their intentions are the missing link between their aspirations and results; finding time is a commonly heard excuse. Our advice is to join the EMC and GO MARVEL! EMC is the Early Morning Club and GO MARVEL is an acronym for activities that we can use during our EMC.
Getting up early is a gift to yourself
As EMC acronym suggests it requires getting up early, we recommend 5 am. Please don’t stop reading! Getting up is a gift we can give ourselves. Few disciplines have the power to transform our lives as does joining the EMC. There is something extraordinary about being up before the crowd. Joining the EMC will allow us to start controlling our day rather than letting our day control us. Rising early will provide you with a least one quiet hour for yourself during the most critical part of the day: The beginning. The GO MARVEL offers a smorgasbord of activities you can experiment with to device your optimal approach to EMC. They are listed below:
- GO MARVEL
- Goals and Organisation
- Mindfulness
- Affirmations
- Reading
- Visualisation
- Exercise
- Logging – Journaling
Goals and Organisation
‘If you don’t know where you are going any road will do.’ – Lewis Carroll
Review your long, medium, daily goals and daily schedule. Ensure that your scheduled activities are aligned with your goals. Ensure that all the resources and background knowledge to support the day are in place.
Mindfulness
Be in the moment
Mindfulness meditation is not some new aged practice reserved for monks sitting atop of mountains. Mediation is a scientifically proven technique. Mindfulness meditation manifests enormous potential for enhancing our mental wellbeing, managing our inner chimp, and developing a clearer and calmer mind. The benefits can become felt by dedicating 10-15 mins of our EMC practice to a mindfulness exercise. We will be more patient in our key relationships, more level headed in the office and happy when alone. Mindfulness meditation will make you abetter, businessperson, life partner, parent and friend. We cannot afford not to discover the power of this 5,000-year-old mind training.
Suggestion use of the many apps to help you get started like Calm, Headspace and Insight.
Affirmations
Affirmation – The word affirmation comes from the Latin affirmare, originally meaning, “to make steady, strengthen.” The words we say have a significant impact on our thoughts and actions by helping us believe in the potential of a work we desire to manifest. For example:
‘I am brave and courageous and stand up and speak for what I believe is right.’
‘I welcome the opportunity and prosperity flowing into my life.’
‘My ability to overcome my challenges is limitless, my potential to succeed infinite.’
Take some time and define mantras that will help you achieve your goals or overcome challenges you are currently confronting.
During you EMC repeat your chosen mantras aloud. During the day, repeat them softly under our breath or in your’ mind’s eye’.
Reading and developing our talents
‘Those who don’t read are as illiterate as those who can’t.’ – Mark Twain
In the workshop, we emphases the importance of taking ownership of our development. EMC is our opportunity to invest some time in reading or reviewing thought leadership in areas within professional and personal life we would like to develop.
Visualisation
Visualisation has been widely used in sports psychology over the last 30 years to enhance all aspects of performance.
Visualisation involves the creation of real or unreal images in the mind’s eye. It uses all of the senses: visual images, images of sound, movement, touch, taste and smell.
There are fundamental principles to make your mental simulation (visualisation) optimal.
1. Close your eyes and set an intention: mentally say what you want to achieve (your goal) in an affirmation.
2. Imagine the situation or future event on which you would like to work. Make the scene as real as you can, like a simulation, using your five senses. The more vividly you can imagine the scene, the better it will be recorded in your mind as a “memory”.
3. Always incorporate strong positive emotions as this is key; without strong feeling, the event visualised won’t seem real enough to be recorded as a memory.
4. Repeat the process often. Try to visualise during every EMC until you notice desirable changes in your behaviour, skills and confidence.
Exercise
The potential effects on our psychological wellbeing go well beyond a purely physical dimension.
- Increase our short term and long term happiness
- Boost our resilience, helping us to manage stress and anxiety
- Keep our brain in shape, maintaining how well it functions.
- Reduce unhappiness, preventing and treating depression and anxiety
Logging-Keep a journal
A journal is not a diary. A diary is a place where you record events, while the journal is a place where you analyse and evaluate them.
Writing in a journal promotes personal growth and wisdom by giving us a forum to study, and then leverage, our past for more significant successes in the future. There is something deeply therapeutic about getting what’s in our head onto paper. Medical research has found that writing in a private journal for as little as 10mins a day can improve mental wellbeing, resilience.
If your life is worth thinking about its worth writing about.
Making the transition to EMC
Now we don’t expect that tomorrow you’ll wake up at 5, spring out of bed and complete every GO MARVEL activity. This process will take time to build into a habit and routine. The more you do it, the easier it becomes, and the more you’ll get out of it, but why not start tomorrow?
Join the early morning club tomorrow morning and set your alarm just 15 minutes earlier than usual and start with only one activity and build up from there gradually. Here’s our recommended EMC starter kit.
Week one: start by getting up just 15 minutes earlier than usual and begin the day with a 10-minute mindfulness exercise.
Week two: Now add an extra 15 minutes and get up half an hour early and add another activity, for example, exercise. Start with your 10-minute mindfulness exercise and now add a 15-20 minute exercise, taking the dog for a walk or any exercise of your choice! Continue this for the next week.
Week three: This week get up 40 minutes earlier and add 10 minutes of logging to your mindfulness and exercise routine.
Week four: Get up an hour earlier than usual. After completing your mindfulness, exercise and logging now include 20 minutes of learning.
We’re slowly building our go marvel morning up and this, of course, can be adapted to the selection of ‘GO MARVEL’ activities you want to focus.
So could you give it a go and reap the rewards? Take a minute now to change tomorrow’s alarm, for just 15 minutes earlier.
