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Most mornings I wake up grumpy and annoyed, I tend to wake up earlier than intended and just get immediately irritated that I’ve missed out on some extra sleep.

Since I started doing these Sunrise Run posts I have not set a morning alarm and have found I wake up naturally between about 5am and 6am

This morning I had to catch a bus to London at 630am for the Professional Speakers Association (PSA) national Convention. I woke up at 450am about half an hour earlier than planned and as usual I was a bit grumpy about that.

So I started hunting for a hypnosis track that was about 30 minutes long where it would end with “you will open your eyes and you will feel refreshed and wide awake” or something similar, but instead I found something even more powerful.

I listened to a short podcast from my friend Joseph Clough, who reminded me about visualisation.

If you have been on one of my Find Your Fire days (next one is this time next week Saturday 25th April) you will know that I’m not a fan of “the secret” or “the law of attraction” in the way it’s portrayed when it’s suggested that you don’t need to actually do anything. Of course you need to actually take some action towards your getting your goals. HOWEVER, there are some good results to be had with visualisation when considering your state of mind.

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I talk at Find Your Fire about how to change your negative internal critic into a positive internal coach and how you can change those negative stories that you tell yourself into positive actions just by thinking differently about the situation. Typically though that’s about changing the stories of your past!

Joseph reminded me that you can do this proactively about the future too. So you can actively imagine how you want a certain situation to be in advance, BEFORE the negative critic kicks in. This is the same technique that top athletes use when they visualise the outcome they want before it happens.

We should all remember Jonny Wilkinson lining up his kicks back in 2003 when England won the rugby world cup. He always talked about imagining the line of the kick and targeting a member of the crowd behind the goal posts and vividly imagining the ball on its trajectory through the posts…

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If you watch bobsleigh competitors you will even see them “flying” down the course with thier whole body moving in time with the imagined twists and turns, well illustrated by the “Cool Runnings” scene in the bath.

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Professional golfers do it all the time too imagining the ball landing exactly where they want it, imagining the ball flying along a path from their club to the landing spot. When you watch it on TV now we even see the track of the ball now, so we can see a really clear example of what the pro is imagining before they hit the ball.

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Amateur golfers on the other hand will focus on all the things they DON’T want to do! Don’t hit it in the water, don’t hit it in the sand, don’t leave it short, don’t hit it too far, don’t hit that tree etc.

What do you expect will happen to this amateur golfer vs the professional golfer who is instead imagining the perfect shot?

On the whole, this will end up being a beautiful example of both golfers tending to get exactly what they focus on! Sure it won’t always turn our exactly how they imagined it, but definitely more often than not you get more of what you focus on.

The reason this happens is because the brain cannot really tell the difference between reality and vivid imagination, this is why if you have a vivid dream you sometimes wake up thinking it really happened.

So that brings us very neatly onto how to wake up without being grumpy!

I expect you have figured it out by now, but the trick is to lie in bed the night before visualising exactly how you WANT the next morning to be. Don’t be thinking about anything bad though.

You should be vividly imagining exactly how you DO want the morning to be, how you will wake up and be excited about the day ahead. How you will be excited about the idea of getting up to do a little exercise and meditation, how nice it will be to feel the hot shower flowing over your body. How great it will be to relax for a change while eating a nice breakfast, fully dressed and ready for the exciting and interesting day ahead….

It’s Saturday morning folks, it’s 0830am and I’m just arriving in London…. What fantastically exciting day do you have planned? How excited about ready for the day are you going to be when you wake up tomorrow morning? What about Monday?! 😉

This time next week you could be super excited about spending the day with me at www.FindYourFire.co.uk

Happy Saturday everyone! 😀 <3