Healthy Mind Set Developing Habits.

Entrepreneurs focus most of their free time on being “traditionally productive” by researching and educating themselves, networking, and engagement on social media channels. Most successful entrepreneurs have been known to commit and prioritize daily grounding habits to develop a positive and healthy mindset. Several small but significant practices help them stay above the rest. 

What are they doing that I am not doing? 

How do they manage so many tasks a day with clarity and focus? 

What is the secret to their success? 

The answer to these questions lies in their habits, the time they take to sit, align, refocus, and replenish their minds and bodies!

Morning Routines 

When running a business, it may seem like there are never enough hours in the day. Tapping into the power of mornings is the key to increasing your productivity. If you wait until the afternoon or evening to do something for yourself like exercising or reading, you will likely push it off the to-do list. Setting up uplifting morning routines helps you set up the tone for a positive and productive day.  

Ultra-successful individuals from the likes of the Apple CEO – Tim Cook, Pepsi CEO – Indra Nooyi, and a long list of such individuals wake up as early as 5 am. People who wake up early can be more proactive and take charge of their life. While everyone else struggles to shovel down breakfast while running out the door late for a meeting, you must have enough time to prepare for your day ahead and take advantage of healthy morning routines.

Getting up just two hours earlier every single day, you gain 14 more hours in the week and 62 each month? Imagine the kind of progress you can make with that extra time.  

Although having 14 more hours in the week is excellent, but how exactly do you plan to spend it? You have to learn to allot your time effectively and move closer to your short and long-term goals. 

Meditation

Business leaders and entrepreneurs like Jeff Weiner (CEO – LinkedIn), Arianna Huffington (Founder of Huffington Post) carve out their busy schedules for meditation practices to bring balance and peace to their stressful daily lives. Meditation is not merely a spiritual practice; it is scientifically backed and purported to come with a host of benefits to your wellness and productivity.

Mindfulness Meditation is known to help stimulate brain areas associated with memory, enhanced learning, and concentration. Over time it helps improve your overall brain health and build your mental capacity since you essentially practicing concentration and laser-like focus. It allows us to recognize and transform our negative emotions by accepting what we are feeling and then releasing them. 

The American Psychological Association (APA) has studied some of the most empirically proven positive benefits of mindfulness meditation, which are:

Reduced Stress

Improved Sleep

Better Focus, Clarity, And Memory

Greater Emotional Control & Self Observation

Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, encouraged his 735 employees to practice transcendental meditation regularly. In a Business Insider interview, Dalio said, “I did it because it’s the greatest gift I could give anyone — it brings about equanimity, creativity, and peace.” Since then, meditation practices have spread throughout Wall Street.

Exercise

An essential habit you can steal from the entrepreneur’s success playbook is exercise. With hectic schedules, long hours of traveling, and not getting the right nutrition every day, entrepreneurs tend to feel chronically physically fatigued, gain weight, and have high amounts of stress. This puts a significant strain on their minds, bodies, and work-life. 

As an entrepreneur, exercising multiple times a week is necessary because it stimulates the release of hormones to boost your mood, jumpstarts your energy, fights stress, helps with better sleep and the benefits are endless. 

“I seriously doubt that I would have been as successful in my career (and happy in my personal life) if I hadn’t always placed importance on my health and fitness,” explains the serial entrepreneur Richard Branson (Founder Virgin Group). “I definitely can achieve twice as much by keeping fit; it keeps the brain functioning well,” says Branson in an interview with FourHourBodyPress. 

Journaling

Journaling can be one of the most powerful techniques to improve your mindset and gain clarity, focus, and streamline your business goals. While these techniques are often celebrated as an effective strategy for personal growth, it has concrete applications for entrepreneurs seeking to get ahead in business.

Very few things come close to providing the clarity of thought and organizing of the mind that journaling being a part of your routine as an entrepreneur can provide. People who engage in intentional reflection daily about their observations, experiences, thought processes, new ideas and kept track of their daily progress through methods like journaling can help you review your performance at work and personally. Journaling is not merely writing a letter to yourself; it’s putting down your thoughts into words, which helps you engage in a creative process that allows you to brainstorm practical solutions and explore new thinking lines. 

Blake Mycoskie (Founder of the multimillion-dollar shoe business TOMS) in an interview “Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss” credits much of his success to a simple habit he started at age 15: Journaling. “It became a form of therapy for me as an early entrepreneur when things were callous, and you didn’t want to tell anyone because you always had to show this air of confidence,” he tells Ferriss. “So then at night, I could be scribbling about how concerned I was.” Mycoskie, now 40, says that journaling has become the most constant habit in his life: “I do it every single morning, sometimes twice a day. I think it’s one of the most powerful habits you can create because a lot of the journaling, too, is goal setting.”

Visualization

All top performers, from elite athletes to the super-rich, use visualization powers. This practice has given some high achievers athletes like the boxing legend Muhammad Ali great success through “mental rehearsal.” He always stresses the importance of seeing himself victorious long before the actual fight. 

Seeing your future and picturing yourself in your mind achieving your goals is an essential step. If you cannot imagine yourself successfully, how will you ever gain the confidence to move forward every day?

Visualization helps one create their dream by accomplishing one goal at a time with hyper focus and complete confidence. Mentally picturing your dreams as already full can rapidly accelerate the achievement of your goals. It helps activate your creative subconscious mind, programs your brain’s internal motivation system to take the necessary actions, and, most importantly, starts the law of attraction, drawing resources, people and opportunists into your life. 

As Tony Robbins (Motivational Coach & Business Strategist) quotes,

“Goal visualization is the next level of mindfulness and meditation. When you harness the power of visualization, you can achieve your goals.”

Time and time again, entrepreneurs are looking for the recipes for success, but they should develop the strong mindset qualities and habits responsible for success.