Reach Your Goals with These 7 Motivating Morning Rituals

Start the day off ready to hustle your way to your best life

From resolutions to bucket lists, we so often review our priorities and set our intentions for the kind of lives we want to be living. Our goals might be career-related or health-focused, but the difficulty isn’t with setting goals at all. Often, the true difficulty is maintaining the consistency to achieve them.

I have found certain life hacks that have helped me to be more consistent in meeting my goals. When I wanted to train for a half marathon, I had to finally stop talking about doing it and actually register for one. I paid the fee and had a clear date in mind for when I needed to be ready. Having that date on the calendar provided motivation for me to train each week. It was no longer an idea. It was an actual event that I needed to prepare myself to run.

There are so many ways that we can take our ideas for what we want in life and turn them into actual things that we’re doing to achieve these goals. Setting the intention alone isn’t enough. Nor is it enough to talk about what we want without putting in the necessary effort to achieve it.

What is helpful is having a reasonable plan, action steps to take, incremental rewards along the way, accountability, and continued motivation. However, I find that it also helps to start each day focusing on our intentions and recommitting to our goals. There are several morning routines that can help us enhance our focus on these intentions. That focus can be a motivating factor to keep us on course as we attempt to complete the tasks we’ve set for ourselves.

Our goals don’t even have to be grandiose. We don’t have to see all 50 states in the USA, or travel to 20 countries, or climb Everest. Sometimes, our goals can be as simple as being a better parent, learning new skills, spending more time on self-care, or even reading more books. Whatever it is that we want from our lives, a morning routine can help us achieve it — even if we don’t consider ourselves a morning person.

Here are 7 motivating morning rituals that can help us achieve our goals:

Begin with a gratitude practice.

Starting out each day with gratitude acknowledges the blessings that we already have in our lives. So often, when we’re working toward a goal, we can become frustrated about what hasn’t yet happened for us, rather than focusing on the good things in our lives in the present moment. When we do this, we miss out on the present and end up frustrated instead.

Creating a daily gratitude ritual can help us focus on appreciation. It can be as simple as waking up and expressing gratitude, saying a prayer, or journaling about what we appreciate. It can include reaching out to let other people know that we feel gratitude for them. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It just needs to be centered in gratitude.

Bring mindful attention into the morning.

As we are getting dressed and getting ready for the day, we can bring in mindful attention to what we’re doing. This gives us a great opportunity to check in with our bodies, our emotions, and our thoughts to see how we’re feeling and if we have any needs that should be addressed. If there’s discomfort we’re experiencing, we can take the time to look more deeply into that while we’re getting ready.

It’s more than just checking in with our physical selves. Bringing mindful attention to the morning involves checking in with our thoughts and emotions. It involves paying attention to both our internal and external worlds. It can even be as simple as looking outside to watch the sunrise with the understanding that every single one is different.

Set intentions over coffee or tea.

Starting out with a hot morning beverage — or perhaps an iced one in warm weather — is often so routine that we can take it for granted, but when we have goals for our life that we’d like to achieve, we can use the time that we’re making and drinking that first cup of morning coffee or tea to focus on our intentions.

What is it that we want? Why is it important to us? Focusing on this while we have our regular morning drink can serve as a daily reminder of our priorities.

Make time for meditation.

I can’t speak for everyone, but mornings in my home can be hectic. Sitting down for an early morning meditation is not a thing that can regularly happen. With two small children to take care of on my own, I usually spend the mornings getting ready myself, dressing children, making breakfast, packing school lunches, and readying backpacks for the day. I’m fortunate if I have time to sit down to drink my coffee.

I can empathize with the difficulties and time constraints of a busy life, but I do feel that if we can find even five minutes in a day to clear our minds, it will help relieve our stress and better focus on our goals. Just having a little quiet can help us gain clarity. Even something as simple as a 5 or 10 minute morning meditation can help us get our thoughts in line — even if it has to wait until a little later in the morning.

Journal or write morning pages.

From The Artist’s Way by Julie Cameron, morning pages are when we write three pages first thing in the morning to express whatever thoughts and feelings happen to be on our minds. This can be another way of clearing out the detritus of our minds so that we can enhance the focus on our intentions. While this can also take up some of our time in the morning, it can be a wonderful way to sharpen our focus. We can also use this time to remind ourselves of the progress we’ve already made toward our goals to help remind us of how far we’ve come.

Decide on small steps.

Reaching our goals isn’t usually about big leaps. Often, it’s about small steps. What we do each day determines the way forward. In the morning, we can decide what we will do to move in the direction of our goals. What small steps are possible? What can we achieve? What changes can we make that will support our goals?

I have many goals. To take care of my health and meet my fitness goals, I make time every day for exercise. Even on my rest days, I take the time to stretch or meditate. Whether I have an hour to exercise or have to squeeze in a much smaller workout, I take steps daily to prioritize my wellness. While progress happens slowly, I understand that what I do each day contributes to those results.

It’s the same with healthy eating or learning a new skill. Small steps may seem insignificant, but they are exactly what it takes to reach our goals. Deciding each day on what small steps we’ll take can be an empowering and motivating way to manifest our goals.

Practice self-compassion.

I would love to wake up each morning, stretch, practice gratitude, say a positive affirmation, and enjoy the quiet until I’ve had my first cup of coffee. I would like to do a yoga flow and meditate and be inspired to hustle my way to my goals. Since I live in reality, this isn’t how my mornings look.

In fact, this morning, I woke up to a sibling squabble, an overflowing basket of laundry I’ve been trying to ignore, a sink full of dishes, and a simmering sense of anxiety. Gratitude felt out of reach, meditation was impossible with the volume of my household, and I couldn’t focus on anything but holding back tears while drinking my coffee. On mornings like this, I don’t need a to-do list of more things I should achieve. I need self-compassion.

Giving ourselves a pass not to be our most high-achieving motivated selves on a tough morning may seem counterintuitive to the subject at hand, but it’s important that we allow some flexibility for the very human experience of a bad day. Self-compassion allows us to accept — and even embrace — the mess without guilt, shame, or judgment. As much as we want to reach our goals, we also need to understand the value of rest and recovery.

While our intentions alone can’t create change, they are certainly important. When we pair those intentions with clear, decisive actions, the lives that we dream of can begin to become a reality. Instead of allowing discouragement to creep in over time, we can do our best to start each day with positivity, gratitude, and mindful focus on who we want to be and how we want to live. Every day we do so, we’ll likely be one step closer to living out our dreams.