I get all kinds of questions about why I wake up so early every morning and how I sustain this discipline without burning out. So, I share my thoughts on the value this holds for me personally while, of course, extending the challenge to you to stretch yourself as well 😉

No, I’m not telling you to wake up at a 3:30 every morning, but I am telling you that finding the right disciplines in life that get you dialed in to your purpose and passion is a game-changer, and may even have you jumping out of bed earlier than you ever imagined because you’re just so dang excited about life. Click the image to watch or read the transcript below →

Transcript

Hello, hello. I just wanted to jump on here really quickly to talk about two things with you. Time management and waking up early in the morning. Two of my very favorite subjects, if you know me at all.

I’m sure a lot of you have seen my Instastories or my Facebook stories that I post every morning of my coffee brewing that has a 3:30 or so timestamp on it. Yes, I do wake up super early at 3:30 every weekday morning. And I get a lot of questions from people asking, when do I go to bed at night, how many hours of sleep do I get every night, how do you do this with two young kids, how do you keep doing this and not burn out at some point?

And that’s actually the question that I want to stay on for a second is, “How do you do this for an extended period of time and just not burn out?” And this is a really simple answer for me. I don’t burn out because I don’t wake up every morning with the goal of being productive. I wake up with the goal every morning of being purposeful. Another way to say that is, I’m intentional about reserving my mornings for personal growth and bettering myself, not necessarily for getting things done.

I want the start of my day to be spent on things that energize me, that fuel me, and fill me, not on the things that deplete me. And I really do this for every area of my life, not just my mornings. In general, I stay very aware of how my time is being managed. I’m always looking at how I’m spending my time, how I’m investing my time, and even how I’m wasting my time.

To me, time management is a lot like managing a bank account. It should be intentional. I’m always checking in, I'm working against a budget, and I’m watching my time change all of those columns, if you will.

I know that probably sounds a little weird or restricting, in a way, but it’s actually not. It’s actually quite freeing. Don’t mistake my hyper-awareness of how I manage my time as me having a bunch of rules around it. I don’t actually have any rules around time management. I only have clarity of my purpose and that’s what drives all of my decisions.

Now, having said that, discipline for the sake of discipline certainly has its place. Because the fact of the matter is, you won’t always feel motivated, or even clear on your purpose. And in those cases, you will fall back to the level of your self-discipline.

So, a lot of time, discovering your purpose to begin with really requires an extended period of consistency toward something that may not initially carry a whole lot of meaning for you. And if that’s the case—if that’s where you’re at in life—my advice to you would be to find something. Find ANYTHING to be disciplined about. And yes, do it for discipline’s sake because it will put you on the path of focus of self-discovery. And then once that starts to unfold and starts to click for you, then you begin to make adjustments from there that ensure you’re spending your time in meaningful ways.

But in the end, I don’t want to push you to be productive. I want to push you to be purposeful. Because when that’s what’s driving you, you’ll naturally gravitate toward spending your time in ways that help to produce against that purpose.

Trust me, when you get this right, you won’t really care what time it is when the alarm goes off in the morning. You’ll just be excited to start your day. And while the rest of the world is running on fumes, you, my friend, are going to be the one that’s fueling up.