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Courtney Townley 0:00
Welcome to the Grace and Grit Podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them. Not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now. As she breaks down the fairy tale health story, you have been chasing all of your life, indispensable action steps and lasting change.
Hello, friends, and welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley, I hope you are doing awesomely well.
Welcome to the Grace and Grit Podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now. As she breaks down the fairy tale health story, you have been chasing all of your life, indispensable action steps and lasting change.
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley. As always I know there are a million spaces in places where you could be right now. So the fact that you’re here, it means a lot and I’m so happy that you’re here.
In case you have not been listening to the Grace & Grit Podcast for a while, or maybe you’re listening to it for the first time, I want to let you know that the Grace and Grit Podcast is going on a short break for the summer of 2023 from producing new episodes.
Now that doesn’t mean there won’t be a weekly episode waiting for you here. What we are doing to support you through the summer is we are doing a summer remix series, which means we are taking some of our most popular themes, and some of our most highly listened to episodes from the past and re dropping them. So you absolutely have a ton of content available to you and a lot of support to help get you through the summer.
That being said, if you are looking to take what you learn here to a much deeper level and really integrate it into your life if you are looking to be a part of a robust community of women who are dedicated to developing their self-leadership skills. If you are looking for coaching support, I would invite you to consider joining us inside of our Rumble & Rise community.
Rumble & Rise is an amazing incubator of support to help women lead themselves more powerfully in the health arena, and well beyond. So you can check out all the details of membership by going to graceandgrit.com/readytorumble.
Membership is only open for a few days at the end of every month. But it is an option for you if you are looking to take a deeper dive this summer. Otherwise, come back here each week and check out our summer remix series, which this episode today is absolutely a part of, I hope you enjoy it.
I titled this episode, the intro and outro of your day. And we are going to talk about why how you start and how you complete your day is so important to any success that you want to create. And I’m sure this is not a new conversation for you. I am sure you have heard of this before. But it’s worth the reminder. Because I have seen time and time again, that women realigning themselves with getting very intentional about how they start and finish their day is an anchor in their health story. It allows them to show up in a much more powerful way throughout the rest of the day. So intro and outro are interesting concepts, they actually come from the land of podcasting.
And I just thought that this was such a parallel concept that I would use it in the show today. So the intro of a Podcast is when you hear the host, introduce the show, you hear the host introduce you to the show, and tell you a little bit about what you can expect from the show that day. And intros aren’t super long. They just lasted maybe up to a couple minutes at most. And it’s really a way of inviting the listener in. Now, the intro to your day is something very similar.
The intro to your day is how you as the host of your day, go about introducing yourself to your day and setting the intentions you have for the rest of the day. And then we have the outro of a Podcast, which is really the message that the host wants to leave the listener with. And it is also an opportunity for the host to offer a call to action. And a call to action is really just directing the listener towards something that might help them in the future, right. So it’s signing up for a newsletter, you know, signing up for a course, like I just mentioned Healthiest Year Yet. That’s what a call to action is. And the outro also includes really just a thank you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being here. Thanks for supporting the Podcast. And then like I said, instructions on where to follow, subscribe and get more information.
So the outro of your day, is the very intentional closing of your day. It’s the message you want to get clear on the message or the learning that you had this day. And offer yourself a call to action for carrying that knowledge into tomorrow. So what I am sort of, you know, very lightheartedly referring to as intros and outros of your day, a lot of other people refer to as book ending. And I have certainly used that term a lot over the course of my teaching. So book ending, same thing. And like I said, a few minutes ago, book, ending your day, is an incredible anchor.
In fact, when you start and complete your day with intention, very rarely, if ever, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone say that that was not a helpful practice. And when I have a client who really feel scattered and disjointed in their process, and we’re looking for a way to easily bring them back into integrity with themselves, this is an awesome starting place.
What are you doing in the morning, to start your day with intention? And how are you closing your day with intention.
This is what it might look like. And I say might look like, because you are not me, I am not you. And the combination of what I use to start my day with intention might be really different from what you use. But in general, the benefit of starting the day with intention is that it allows us to practice response versus reaction. So it moves our energy into a place of inquiring how we want to respond to this day, versus reacting to the day. Starting the day with intention also allows us to manage our time in a way that is in line with our values. versus, you know, going getting out of bed jumping out of bed and just immediately allowing the day to have its way with you.
I really see that morning, intentional time as an opportunity to protect your resources. And when I say resources, I mean your time, your energy, your bandwidth, your focus those types of things. Morning intentionality allows us to not be so scattered. It allows us to direct our energy towards what we say is most important to us. And it allows us to get organized around those things.
And at the end of the day, right, what is closing the day with intention actually mean? Well, it just means that you take a few moments to review the day, how did the day roll? How did you genuinely feel on this day? How at peace? Are you with how you showed up in this day? What are you celebrating about this day? What did you learn? What are you grateful for? Are there some strategies or organizations that you may need to rework because it didn’t quite play out the way that you hoped it would?
Now, there’s a lot of reasons we don’t do this. There’s a lot of reasons we don’t start our day with intention and we don’t wrap up our day with intention. So number one, we don’t protect our resources. So we don’t go to bed on time. A lot of us are staying up way too late in the night. And then of course what that means is we’re not going to get up with enough time to get our heads straight before we go out and tackle the world.
The other thing that happens is, we overspend our energy all day long to the point that we have no energy. To wrap up our day with intention, we’re just simply too tired. So not protecting our resources is definitely a barrier to this practice. Another barrier is that we make it too complicated. Holy cow, can you make these, you know, opening and closings to your day super complicated and really lengthy in terms of time. And while I do think it’s true that once you tap into these practices, you are probably going to want to dedicate more time to them. If you start out with this, like, you know, hour long morning routine, coming from a place where you really haven’t been doing anything, you might show up for day one, you’re not going to show up on day two, it’s too much. So we want to really simplify if especially when we’re first starting out, really simplify and not allow it to make up take up a lot of time.
I think another reason that we don’t do this is because we are so distracted. So we wake up, and what do a lot of people do the first thing they get up out of bed, I have certainly been guilty of this, we grab our cell phone, right, we check our email, we check our social media accounts, and immediately we get pulled out into the world. We’re distracted. And then it’s really hard to bring ourselves back.
A few things to consider. If you do want to tap into this practice of starting and wrapping up your day with intention is, number one, be willing to experiment. Because like I said just a few minutes ago, what works for me may not work for you. So I don’t think that there is a perfect structure to starting or finishing your day with intention, I think you have to find what works for you, I also think you need to apply structured flexibility, which means your morning and evening routines are not always going to look the same. Because you are going to have periods of the year that are far more stressful than others, you’re going to have a lot more demand at certain times of the year and energetically than you do at other times. So it makes a lot of sense that what you’re doing in the opening and closing of your day would shift.
Also remember that starting and finishing your day with intention is not a have to you don’t have to do it. But a lot of people once they taste it, it’s a want to. So remember, thoughts are powerful, because they are really going to drive your willingness to experiment with this or not be open to it at all. And so if you tell yourself, this is something that you have to do, your inner toddler will come out in full force, and you will not do it, you will not show up not for very long, certainly not consistently. So remind yourself, it’s a get to, I get to start my day with intention, if I choose to.
The last thing that I really wanted to talk about today was how to start if you are someone who literally gets out of bed in the morning, and it’s like a fire drill. You are just carried away by other people’s stuff. And you are throwing yourself into the world immediately getting out of bed. I want to talk about how to reclaim just a tiny bit of your morning time. Because again, I think that we can make it way too overwhelming. Or we look back at maybe morning routines that we’ve had in the past and they may not fit your current life. So these are some things I just want to offer you that I think can be really powerful. You could do one of them. You could do all of them. None of them have to take a lot of time.
So the practice of making your bed so simple and so powerful. Because you accomplish something right away. And when you get into bed at night, you reap the benefits from taking that action. So making your bed as soon as you get up out of bed takes you what less than a minute. I don’t know how complicated your bedding is, but my bed takes literally a minute To make. And it helps me to feel less cluttered mentally, like right out of the gate, I’m feeling more organized, I’m feeling successful. The second thing that’s super powerful is doing something to energize our nervous system. We’ve been sleeping, right. So we might feel really groggy when we first wake up, I often do.
For me, energizing my nervous system right now looks like playing a great song, something that makes me want to move my body. And I literally move however, that song inspires me for the duration of the song. And honestly, most songs that I that I play are three to four minutes tops. So making my bed takes me one minute, energizing my nervous system in the way that I’m choosing to currently do that is taking me like maybe three to four minutes.
And then, just like I made my bed to kind of tidy my space, I want to clean out my brain. I know just from getting to know myself that I have a lot going on in my head when I first get up in the morning. And it tends to be a very creative time for me. So I want to explore what is in there and kind of clear out anything that doesn’t need to be there. So I do put pen to page, and I write for just a few minutes. Usually, it’s like literally three to five minutes. Sometimes like if it’s on a weekend, I might actually sit and write for 20 minutes.
And then the next thing that I do is I look at my calendar for the day. I organize, I consider my biggest priorities for the day. Based on literally my priority filter. So priority filter is knowing the top three most important things in your life right now. And ordering them 123 That’s very hard for a lot of people to do, because we can list our top three priorities pretty fast, but then to put them in order feels hard. But I use that priority filter to structure my day. So I know that I’m living in line with my values.
Organizing, of course includes my work schedule, it includes my self care, it includes my family time, all of that gets lined out for the day. So I’m managing my time to make sure that I can show up for all the things that I care about. And when I show up for those things, I can be all in because I dedicated this time to that.
And then the final piece of this, at least again, what I’m offering you today, this may not be the final piece of your morning routine. But something that I encourage a lot of clients to start experimenting with is meditation followed by visualization. So meditation is really a practice of checking in with your internal landscape of learning how to notice, name and notice rather than react, sort of allow whatever’s going on to be I also see it as a practice of focus. Because when our attention drifts away, we just gently pull it back. So for all of these reasons, I think meditation is a really fabulous way to start our day because it allows us to respond rather than react.
And then visualization. I usually spend a couple minutes at the end of my meditation, which my meditations are very short, five to 10 minutes tops, because that’s generally all the time I have for that five to 10 minutes, you could do less than that you could do two minutes. And visualization is simply the practice of me walking myself through my day, in my mind, in the way that I would like it to roll. And I will tell you, the days that I visualize, go so much better than the days that I don’t.
Alan Richardson, who is an Australian psychologist did a study with basketball players specifically to help people understand the power of visualization. And he took this group of basketball players and divided them into three groups. The first group, practice free throws for 20 minutes the Second group, visualized free throws. And the third group didn’t do anything.
And what’s really interesting about this is at the end of the study, what came to light is that the players who practiced, obviously improved their skill set. The players who only visualized, also improved their skill set. The players who did nothing didn’t improve at all. But the takeaway here, I think, is that practice, combined with visualization is a recipe for a whole lot of success. Right, we’re taking two things that helped to improve our proficiency in something and combining them together.
So visualizing at the start of the day, how you’d like your day to roll. And then, of course, during your day, you’re going to actually practice the things you’re visualizing. Give it a go, see if you don’t notice the difference.
To recap, and again, these are just suggestions. This is certainly not an exhaustive list of all the things you could be doing in the morning. But spending a minute making your bed, even if that’s all you do, somehow energizing your nervous system that might be going outside for a walk like me, it might be dancing to the tune of one song, it might be stretching for a few minutes, it might be taking a cold shower, it could look like a lot of different things. Purging what’s in your brain? Get your thoughts out on paper to see what’s going on upstairs. What do you want to keep? What do you want to let go of? Organize your time for the day? How are you going to show up in this day, quite literally, with intention? Where are you directing your energy? Where are you directing your precious resources? And then meditate. And visualize those are all the things I mentioned. And for me that all of those practices combined, usually take me way less than 30 minutes, like I would say, between 20 and 30 minutes.
So then let’s just talk about the evening routine.
Evening routine for me is is about, yes, getting myself ready for sleep, setting up a really healthy sleep cycle by letting my body wind down in a natural way. But it’s also about reassessing the day. It’s about taking stock of what this day afforded me. Where were the wins? Where were the rumbles? How might I want to experiment differently tomorrow based on what I learned?
Really checking in for me again, looks like a super quick meditation, I don’t even know if I would call it a meditation. It’s more of just a body, a body scan, checking in with where I’m at physically, mentally, emotionally. Looking at my schedule, and how I showed up in the day, in all of the spaces and places I plan to show up in. And do I like how I showed up there? And if not, no judgement, right? I don’t get into dramatic storylines. But I do get inquisitive. Why don’t I like how I showed up there. Maybe I was feeling really overwhelmed. Maybe I was really reactive. Maybe something it took me way longer than I thought it would. And this knowledge informs the strategies I’m gonna use for tomorrow.
This is to me, it’s literally the gateway to expansion. It’s the gateway to self development is the reassessing of our day at the end of the day. And of course, being grateful for being able to live the day and looking for the nuggets that I want to express specific gratitude towards for that day.
I think it’s really easy to get in the rut by the way of being grateful for the same things all the time, which that’s, you know, awesome. There’s probably parts of your life that you really are consistently grateful for. I hope that’s true. But I also think it’s a great exercise to challenge yourself to look for new things to be grateful for so, I don’t know what the intro and the outro to your day needs to look like. I do know that it is a practice worth experimenting with. So tomorrow setting your alarm 10 minutes earlier, which might mean, but tonight, you need to go to bed a little bit earlier. And if the intro and the outro seem overwhelming, because it’s really right two practices, just start with the morning routine. Just start there and notice how your day rolls differently.
Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of the Grace and Grit Podcast. I hope there was something in here that allows you to travel forward with a little bit more ease and grace.
And again, if you’re looking for a higher level of support, I would really encourage you to check out our Rumble & Rise membership community. You can check out that community and all that it entails by heading on over to graceandgrit.com/readytorumble. Have a wonderful week and I hope I’ll see you again next time take care.
Thank you for listening to the Grace & Grit Podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story. And it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self care. You are worth the effort and with a little grace and grit anything is possible.
