The Daily Document that Changed My Life

It took me a long time to figure out how to incorporate a daily practice into my actual life. I had heard SO MANY MENTORS exhaustively talk about establishing morning routines, printing out your goals and visioning documents, posting them and looking at them every day….Yawn. 

BORING! Who has time for this kind of frivolous time-consuming crap? We need to be out there doing things that really move the needle! HUSTLING! Scheduling meetings, booking clients, marketing, running to and fro, making calls, engaging on social media. Right? 

Well, yes. Sometimes we DO need to do all of these things. AND. 

What I have learned over time (over a long and painful amount of time, ha) is that without a strong practice of what one of my most influential mentors Christine Kane calls ‘constant, gentle re-alignment’, we can get off track REAL QUICK. We can get caught up in the chaos monster, the insidious infiltrator of our daily schedule that with shockingly little effort has us believing that the more admin tasks we can do in a day, the more emails we respond to, the more scrolling and posting, the more errands we run, the more people we talk to…the more we are accomplishing. (If you want to put a face to the chaos monster, for me it looks like a mean version of the character Anxiety in ‘Inside Out 2’, a brillo film if you haven’t seen it yet.)

And oh, but all of these tiny busy tasks are sooo alluring. I can spend an entire day like some kind of crazed hyped-up business maniac: typing, texting, calling, responding, and get to the evening exhausted with a distinct hollow and dehydrated feeling, somehow without having literally accomplished one task that ACTUALLY ‘moved the needle’. Ya know? 

But…what does it look like to re-align constantly? 

My answer to this came in the form of a Daily Document that I created called a ‘Guiding Document’. This one or two page very simple, non-fancy document lays out the basics: My business and personal Words of the Year, Totem, Goals, Guiding Practices, Daily Question, Non-negotiables, and some Gentle Reminders. And it is called a Daily Document because, well, you look at it every damn day. 

I would be lying if I said that I really do sit down for a one-on-one with this lass every single day. That IS the goal. But ok, some days you gotta leave your house at 3:30am to catch a flight. Or take care of an urgent family matter. Or you had insomnia all night and fell asleep at 6am, only to wake up ten minutes before your first meeting. Shit happens, right?

However, barring any unforeseen or extreme circumstances, this is the morning ritual that I go for BEFORE starting work: drink lemon water, take AG1 Vitamins, meditate, make my bed while I brew the coffee, and then sit the F*#! down with this document. I CONSIDER the document. I spend about five minutes with it and try hard to be fully present like I would with a best friend.

The primary question that I ask myself as I review this document is “Does my plan for today align with what is here?”. Meaning, the meetings on the calendar, the work planned, the possible extracurriculars, my workouts (or, ahem, lack thereof). Is the type of person that I am working to become laid out on these pages also the type of person reflected in my week/ month/ quarter plan? If the answer is no… I adjust my priorities. If the answer is yes, Bravo! Big Win. 

(A quick little aside of tough love: If you are thinking to yourself that you absolutely would never have time for a morning ritual like that, I hear ya. It’s easy to believe that. I used to believe that too. You’re obviously going to have to change some things around. Most likely it means that you’ll need to get up earlier. Which of course means that you’ll need to go to bed earlier. Which almost always means cutting out (at least some) Netflix or social media scrolling in the evenings. And yes, this is even possible for people with kids.) 

Some people print out their documents and have them everywhere; looking at them in between meetings, in line at the grocery store instead of their phone, while they are waiting for appointments, or when they feel upset and are considering heading out to the bars on a wild bender which includes downing shots of things that have stupid names and waking up with your contacts still in, or binging everything in the fridge, or texting your ex. 

This Guiding Document can be your companion, your cheerleader, your pal, your mini-coach in your quest for constant, gentle realignment. 

Make this document your own, incorporate it into your routine, and try it out for a month. See what happens.