Ep #53: Morning Thoughts Will Create Your Day

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:09.6] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Alpha Male Coach podcast. The only podcast that teaches men the cognitive mastery and alpha mindset that it takes to become an influential and irresistible man of confidence. Here is your host, certified life coach and international man of mystery, Kevin Aillaud.

[EPISODE]

[0:00:32.6] KA: What’s up my brothers. Welcome back to the Alpha Male Coach podcast. I am your host, Kevin Aillaud and let’s talk today about morning thoughts. Just so you guys know, I have a membership team and a Facebook group. They are both called the Elevated Alpha Society. The membership team is the Spartans and they are going through a program called the Agoge.

When I say the Elevated Alpha Society, there are two, one is my tribe, that’s the Agoge, that’s the Spartans and the other is the Facebook group. Now, before we get into morning thoughts, guys, pause the podcast, go to iTunes, leave me a five-star rating and review. We are doing so well, we’ve broken a hundred, we’ve got less than 400 to go. I know you guys love this podcast and if you love it and you’re supporting the free content that I’m putting out there for you guys, just go ahead, leave me a five star, leave me a one-word review, that would be amazing and we will get to 500 before you know it.

Now, I decided to make this podcast episode on morning thoughts because in the elevated alpha society Facebook group, we are doing a 30 day No Snooze Button Challenge. Every day, the alphas participating will post what time they woke up and the thought that got them out of bed. The idea is to decide the night before on a powerful thought that you want to think upon waking up so that you’ll be less tempted to repeat the process of hitting the snooze button and more driven to jump out of bed.

Which is an action created by a different emotion and thought than the familiar cognition that drives hitting the snooze button. I’m going to go deeper into this process. In this podcast episode so that you can see that there’s an awareness piece that comes with this as well.

[0:02:30.5] KA: Now, many of my students wake up in the middle of the night with thoughts which is a whole different topic but I think it’s kind of similar because it’s waking up and having thoughts just going on in your head immediately. I have also been thinking a lot lately about the level of anxiety that I have in my life.

Although it seems that you don’t feel like it’s so much more than I ever had to deal with before I’ve learned to deal with it very well. I’m not walking around with a lot of anxiety but I do work on it a lot and I want you guys to understand this, it’s not that there’s any more anxiety in my life than there was before.

But it’s that I just never dealt with it before, right? I was buffering with pornography or marijuana or just doing something – busying myself in the world. Now, I’ve come to this place in my life where I’m not as impulsive. I don’t do as many things that distract me from myself and so I’ left with me, this human who has all these emotions and I’m not avoiding them or resisting them.

I really see this clearly in my morning thinking. I actually experienced this when I was younger as a kid. But I hadn’t remembered it until I started preparing for this podcast. I remember, I used to wake up in the morning when I was a kid and immediately, I would be struck with fear and think about my step dad and if I was going to get hit that morning, before school or if it would come after school and how intense it would be and that would determine what kind of day I was going to have.

As I got a little bit older, after my mom left this guy, I was always waking up and thinking about people at school and if they would be friendly to me or mean to me, if the girls would smile at me or if they would laugh at me. Most recently, as an adult, between the age of 25 to 35, I would wake up with thoughts about money and scarcity and lack and anxiety all around that.

[0:04:30.3] KA: What I’ve realized is that this obsessive thinking about what other people think about us, the obsessive thinking about how much money we have, the obsessive thinking about our girlfriend or our wife or if we’re going to stay married or if we’re going to get married or have an affair, or whatever it is that goes on in our minds is a way of distracting ourselves from what is really going on in our mind.

It’s almost like we’re creating drama for ourselves. I know I did that really with money. Always kind of creating drama, thinking about the money, thinking about what I spent the day before, thinking about all the bills I had to pay the next day, using so much of my brain power to stay focused on things other than what was going on for me.

When I didn’t do it that much, I noticed that I woke up and I have a lot of anxiety producing thoughts that automatically jumped in. I think it’s because I wasn’t directing my mind towards money or relationships or anything. I just didn’t have a purpose to direct my mind towards. Then I started thinking, maybe I could use this methodology, I could use my methodology to direct my throughs and direct my feelings towards the way that I want to go.

I’m not going to wake up and obsess about what’s troubling me. Maybe I’ll wake up and direct my mind to think in a way that I want to think. I wanted to share my thoughts and my process as I move forward with doing this, not just because of the No Snooze Challenge in the Elevated Alpha Society but also because I know a lot of you have the same experience.

[0:06:00.2] KA: You wake up – and I want you guys to think about this. When you wake up, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Maybe you don’t remember. Do this tomorrow morning. What is your first morning thought? Your first thought of the day. What happens in your brain, what’s going on. I want to tell you that just the process of paying attention to what you are thinking, will bring you into a moment of presence, it brings you into the now and because you’ll be present, watching your current mind, that in and of itself is a move into cognitive mastery, brother.

Here’s what I want you to notice. Do you immediately have a thought about the past, or do you immediately have a thought about the future? For me, often times, I’ll wake up and I’d have an immediate thought about something that I did the day before or the night before. At first I thought maybe I had acted in a way that was inappropriate or something the night before or did something during the day.

Because I’d wake up and I’d be like, my gosh, I can’t believe I did that. But then, every morning when I woke up and had the same thought, I caught on to what the beta condition was doing, right? It was then that I realized, “okay, this is a pattern of thought that can’t be happening every single morning that I’m waking up because it’s not possible that I’m doing something regrettable every night.”

Especially the stuff that I was obsessing about or worrying about saying or whatever. It didn’t align with who I am. I was noticing this pattern in myself to wake up and you know, I would think, “I shouldn’t have done that,” or, “I shouldn’t have done this,” or, “I shouldn’t have said that,” or, “I shouldn’t have acted this way,” right? Shouldn’t have whatever. Didn’t matter.

[0:07:43.0] KA: I would find something to fixate on and I noticed some of you guys do this too. You start fixating on something in your past or something that happened the night before, the day before, the week before, whatever. And just notice that pattern. Now, here’s what I’m saying and please don’t turn too now when I say notice that pattern because what I really mean is notice that your brain is doing that.

The beta condition. Because, as soon as you notice that it’s a pattern and it’s coming from the beta condition, you’re not going to take it personally. You’re not going to use it against yourself. You’ll begin to recognize that it comes from your brain, not from you or having to do with anything about you.

Now, when I wake up, it’s, “oh my gosh, I shouldn’t have – Ah I see what you’re doing there, brain. I got you.” You’re searching for something to mess with yourself with. You’re searching for a problem that isn’t there. For some of you, you will notice that when you wake up, you start worrying about something in the future, right?

For some of you, it’s the day ahead rather than the day behind. You start thinking about what you have to get done that day. For some of you, it’s even the longer future. You worry immediately about money and thinking about how much money you’re going to have or not have or start thinking about the money that you do have in your bank account now and how will that affect your future.

That was me for years, bro, for years, it didn’t matter if I was making six figures a year or if I was going further and further into debt, you know, credit card debt because I was building a business. I had money scarcity issues and it would show up in my morning thoughts. I want you guys to notice this for yourself. Is that a real genuine concern? Money, I mean.

[0:09:29.0] KA: Or, do your thoughts change depending on how much money you have? Because if they don’t, then you know it’s your brain. Isn’t that crazy? If your thoughts are always the same regardless of how much money you have, then it’s just your brain. Check this out, if you’re constantly waking up and you’re worried about how much you have to do in the day and your level of anxiety about what you have to do in the day is the same regardless of how many things you have to do, then you know it has nothing to do with your day, right?

It has to do with your beta condition. It’s your brain telling you these things. That is your brain’s go to morning routine. I mean, what is your brain’s go to morning routine? What is it that you’re thinking in the morning? Everybody has a primary question. You wake up in the morning and you ask yourself this primary question or what happened early in the morning, right?

For many people, that’s what their first thought of the day is, right? It’s that question of, how much do I have to do today? Or even more simply, what do I have to do today? Then they start listing, right? The brain starts going through all those things.

The first step is really to figure out what are your morning thoughts and are they consistent? What I found is that they usually are. Now, if you wake up in the morning and you feel great and positive and wonderful and you greet the day and you’re always having positive thoughts in the morning, that’s usually routine.

[0:10:53.7] KA: Now, this isn’t the majority that I found. In fact, I’ll just ask you guys, I’ll just throw it out there to you. How many people do you know who say they wake up and immediately they have positive thoughts? Some people may transition their mind to positive thoughts but do they go automatically to, “It’s a great day. I can’t wait to wake up. It’s beautiful.”

Or do they have to work to get to that place of happiness? Is there a moment where you have to direct your brain or does it automatically go there? For me, my brain doesn’t automatically go to happy land and I want you guys to know this. It goes usually to an anxiety producing thought. Recently, it’s been trying to find in the most recent past, something to obsess over.

When I do this. When I wake up and I notice what my brain is doing, I’ve already pulled myself out of the beta condition and into the present moment. I’m in my alpha state because now I’m watching my brain. Don’t misunderstand the power of doing just that. Even if just that is where you can get to, then that is a huge leap, because as I watch my brain, what works for me is to be humorous with it.

Look, I like to joke and be silly and have fun, guys. I have fun with people and I do it with my brain too, i do with the beta condition. For me, I’ll say “Aha!” Right? “I see what you’re going. I see where you’re going. I see what you’re trying to do there. I’m on to you, you sneaky brain.” I have a little banter with my own brain because that’s my thing. What is it that you want to do with your brain when you notice that it’s doing something like that.

[0:12:31.5] KA: What’s your personality. What do you want to do? Do you want to be kind to yourself? Do you just want to say, “Look, I understand. You’re just trying to protect me and keep me safe.” Or do you want to get mad at yourself? What’s your natural inclination?

I pay attention to the thoughts but I don’t give them any merit because they’re so predictably illogical and then I allow the anxiety to come into my body but it doesn’t have much juice to it at that point because I already know that the cause of the anxiety is the illogical misguided thinking that’s starting for me in the morning.

One of the things that’s important about this paying attention is, for many people, what happens is when they wake up and they have anxiety-producing thoughts and they go immediately into avoidance. They immediately disconnect, right? They hit the snooze and go back to sleep and this continues until the last second, right? Till you just can’t hit the snooze anymore and then it’s busy time. They get up and they get busy. They just start pursuing their day or they distract themselves.

They immediately get up and they get on social media. They immediately get up and start directing their brain to their email. They look in their mirror and they judge the way their body looks. They judge their health. They look at their bank accounts. They look at their investments.

Whatever it is that people do to avoid what’s going on in their brain.

Just notice. For you, what do you normally do? Do you avoid what’s happening in your mind? Are you curious about what’s happening in your mind? What I like to think about with my brain in the morning is that there’s no right or wrong answer. There’s nothing right or wrong about what’s going on up there. It’s like when you open the book that you’re reading to the page where you left off.

You know, you just kind of stopped reading a certain place. So, when you open up to read again, you’re not thinking, “Oh my gosh. That’s horrible. I can’t believe I stopped reading in the middle of the page,” right? They don’t say that, you just look at it like, “Okay, this is where I stopped and I’ll just start right here.”

[0:14:34.1] KA: If I want to, I can train my brain to do something different. In the morning time, is when your brain has the most energy. It makes the most sense too, like we would have the most energy in the morning because that’s when you can use your brain power to reprogram itself.

What I mentioned in the beginning of the podcast in reference to the No Snooze Challenge is that you can make decisions ahead of time, right? The night before. Then you can make commitments and plans ahead of time for the morning. That will really help when you run out of brain energy to work against its own resistance later in the day. Because you’ve already made the commitment so there’s no decision to be made.

First, you notice what’s going on in your brain and you notice, for most of us that it’s negative, that the thoughts that are going on in there are negative and then you can decide what you want your brain to think in the morning. This is why the No Snooze Challenge is powerful. I have the most brain power in the morning.

When I wake up, my first thoughts have been negative so I’m using all that brain energy to think negative thoughts. It’s also the best time for me to reprogram my brain and I have the opportunity right there. Right in the morning. So, with that challenge, with for all of you guys listening, it’s like, “What do I want to direct my brain to do in the morning? What do I want my morning thoughts to be?”

[0:15:58.2] When I was researching for this topic and thinking about this topic, which is mostly what the research that I do is thought work, one of the things that came up was affirmations and I know a lot of people use affirmations. A lot of people wake up and they have a script that they immediately say to themselves in the morning and I think this is a fantastic idea. I do this myself. I call it identity work and I do it every morning within the first 15 minutes of waking up.

And I think programming your brain to think certain thoughts in the morning by practicing them is a great idea. A lot of people wake up and they say a prayer. They say something to themselves that puts them in a good space mentally and emotionally. Now my only criteria for this is that whatever it is you’re practicing thinking in the morning, it needs to be something that you believe and it needs to be something that literally creates the feeling that you want.

So here is what I mean by that. I want to go a tiny bit deeper with that. If you say to yourself, “I am going to wake up in the morning and say, ‘I am the most amazing person in the world,’” and then you wake up in the morning and you say to yourself, “I am the most amazing person in the world,” and you don’t believe that thought, it will have no emotional impact on you. In fact, it will probably have some kind of negative emotional impact because your brain won’t believe it. And it will just tell you that you are lying.

If you wake up in the morning and you say something that you don’t believe to yourself and you create a negative emotion, you are doing the opposite of what you want to do. The other thing is there are often thoughts that you believe should feel good, right? Thoughts like, “I love you,” and, “You’re wonderful,” and, “You have a great life,” and, “You are so lucky to have everything you want.” Now those thoughts may sound great and positive but you have to test them bro.

[0:17:45.8] You got to actually feel them. You have to make sure that they literally, and I say literally, feel good when you think them. It’s got to feel good in your body. It can’t just sound good in your head. You can’t just say, “Oh that should make me feel good.” It has to make you feel good or it is not going to give you the result that you are looking for in your life. So when you look at some affirmations that you may want to adopt for your morning routine, those are the criteria.

You might want to come up with some of these on your own. The first thing you’re going to do is supervise your mind, right? Which is already putting you in that present moment and then you are going to direct your mind in putting it into a planned thought pattern. So instead of waking up and just having a knee-jerk anxiety thought pattern, which is what my brain tends to do, I am going to have a planned thought pattern that serves me.

One of the things that I do if I wake up in the middle of the night and I find myself spinning on anxiety, I repeat the mantra, “I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you,” and I just say it over and over and over again, literally in my brain. “I love you. I love you. I love you.” That is what I do in my brain and it works like magic for me in the middle of the night and even in the morning time. I did this for months after one of my closest relationships changed from romantic to friendship.

And I took it really hard and I thought it was about me and my brain fought me really hard. It tried to convince me that it was about me and so for months the, “I love you,” mantra really, really worked for me. Even the other night I woke up and I was thinking about someone that I was having a conflict with in my own brain and all I did was say, “I love (their name),” right? And I would just say their name. “I love them, I love them, I love them,” and that really helps to.

[0:19:41.5] That may be something that you want to try to direct your mind to. Think about how, do you want to feel when you wake up in the morning, and how would you need to think in order to feel that way, and then, what would you end up doing if you felt that way, right? Because that is the universal truth brother, see it? Thoughts, great emotions that drive actions. Creating that deliberate thought pattern right?

Think about – today is going to be an amazing day. I am going to feel great today. I am going to create my day. I get to decide what to do today. There is nothing I have to do ever. I get to choose what I want to do today. Those for me are really powerful things to be saying and I have posted a few of those on the Elevated Alpha Society Facebook group page during the No Snooze Challenge. How about some of these for you guys that are in your past when you wake up: “The past is over. I can let it go. Whatever happened in the past was meant to happen and I can move on with my future. Everything is perfect. Everything happens for me and not to me.”

Those are thoughts that I believe enough and feel good enough to me that I can deliberately think. One of the things you can do is just list all the things that you like and I love doing this too. This will put you in a positive mental frame and it will build your relationship with yourself.

You know, you could just talk about all the things that you like in your mind just repeat them over and over again. Things that I would say like, “I like my house. I like my car. I like my Harley. I like warm coffee. I like being strong. I like watching falcons.” I am a bird watcher in case you guys didn’t know. I like watching raptors. I like traveling. I like sunny days. I like scuba diving. I like talking to beautiful women. You know just focus on things that you like.

[0:21:33.1] It will help you connect with yourself and it will put you in that positive mental frame. Notice how you feel. Are you creating that positive emotion from that mental frame. That is one idea that you can have especially if your brain is trained to think of anxiety-producing things. To have it think about things that it likes.

You can also think about things that you’re grateful for and this is powerful. There’s so much research, tons of research that shows that it’s very hard, almost impossible even, to be in a state of gratefulness and scarcity, right? To be in a state of gratefulness and anxiety at the same time, and so if you start thinking about what you are grateful for in your life, it can put you in a state of gratitude, which will allow you to open your day for receiving, for abundance, and for feeling those positive emotions. It is really important now for me to allow myself to think that what I am thinking, and feel what I am feeling before I try to change it, right?

Because I don’t want to teach myself that I can’t feel anxiety and I don’t want to teach myself that I can’t deal with negative thoughts or with anxiety producing thoughts and we are going to do this all through the months of November in the Spartan Agoge, in the Elevated Alpha Spartan team. Because, balancing emotion, knowing that anxiety is just an emotion it is not something to resist or avoid is so powerful.

So for me, what I like to notice. I just take a note. I just listen to it. I just again banter with it a little bit. It’s like, “Hey, it’s anxiety, right? There it is. It is not a big deal.” It is not the end of the world. I don’t have to go and take a big giant bong hit because I am feeling anxious, which is what I used to do in a wake and bake kind of thing. That is what I would do when I would buffer, when I would avoid that emotion. But I do know that it’s a choice to feel anxiety because it comes from my thinking and I can say, “Oh, so look at me. I’m thinking thoughts that are causing anxiety.”

[0:23:41.3] “I see, I see where you’re going with this,” is what I say to my brain, right? I see where you’re heading. I know what you are trying to do,” but I don’t freak out about it, right? I’m just like, “Hey. Yeah. This is where we’re at. This is what’s supposed to be happening for me right now,” and that is when I am able to shift to what I want my brain to be thinking about. If I avoid or resist that anxiety, if I am not curious about it or allow it to happen, then I am never going to be able to change or shift my thought.

So it is a really interesting question to ask yourself guys. What do you want your brain to be thinking about? If you have limited brain energy throughout the day and your brain literally goes into fatigue when it has to make too many decisions, then you want to make sure that you are spending its energy thinking about the things that are most important, thinking about the things that are going to serve you. I think about how many hours my brain spent thinking about the money in my bank account.

I think about how much brain energy I spent wondering what my girlfriend was doing when she wasn’t with me. I’ve put some serious brain power into thinking those things. I trained my brain to think that way and it just kills me because I didn’t know any better, right? I didn’t know about or have anyone to teach me the skillset of cognitive mastery and emotional ownership.

So now I have let’s say 16 hours that I am going to be awake. 16 Hours of waking hours. I sleep about eight hours. I have the most powerful tool on the planet right here, right between my ears and behind my eyes. What do I want it to spend its time doing? Do I want it to spend its most precious time, it’s most powerful time, which is in the morning – what do I want it to be thinking about? What do I want it to be practicing? What do I want it to be doing? And as I was researching for this episode, the consistent message that I got over and over again.

In terms of business advice was – don’t do social media and don’t do email in the morning. It is a low brained activity and it burns up energy, morning energy. On task that can be done much more easily than other tasks that we would have to do in the afternoon. We could just shift it.

[0:26:02.0] Okay, so when you wake up, what do you want your brain to be thinking about? You have to tell it what to think about. That is what I want you to focus on.

One of the things I teach my students is to wake up and read your goals as a practice. Now that is something that I do but it is usually after I’ve had all my anxiety thoughts, right? I read my goals. So what are your goals? Tell your brain to focus on your goals. Tell your brain to focus on what you want, what you dream about, what you want to create. I like to think about my students in the morning because that is my team. That is my tribe.

I like to drink coffee and think about my students and think about the tools that I can create for them to help them help themselves and help them help themselves be more effective in their life, and I think about my own self, and I think about my own mind work, and that’s when I really want to be focused on how I can help myself the most because I know if I can figure that out – if I can really grow myself, if I can take myself to the next level and the next level and the next level. Then I am going to be able to help you, all of you, out the most.

So in the morning, what do I want my first thought of the day to be? “I will create this day.” Now don’t wake up and say, “This is going to be a good day,” right? You’re going to create a good day. The day isn’t just good. Goodness doesn’t just happen to you. You create the goodness. You create the day. “I am going to create this day. I will direct my mind. I am in charge of what happens in my brain.”

[0:27:44.6] I can control it the best in the morning and that’s when I will. And when I wake up and I am having negative thoughts and I am having negative emotions, it is just my brain on autopilot. It is just my beta condition running its pattern. It is just my brain doing what my brain does, just firing thoughts. Boom, boom, boom, rapid fire. You know they don’t have to mean anything negative and I don’t have to tap into those thoughts and think them.

I can allow them to be there and then I can change them. So head over to the Elevated Alpha Society Facebook group and what I’d love to hear from you all is, first of all, what do you think about when you wake up in the morning? What is your first morning thought? Join the No Snooze Challenge. Then after you’ve told us what your morning thought is, what do you want your morning thought to be? What do you want your brain to use its precious and most powerful time for to do?

Do you want it to just go on autopilot throughout the day or do you want to use some of its energy to change the way you think in the morning, to change the way you end up thinking all day long, because brother, you get to decide. That is cognitive mastery. Find yourself an amazing question to ask yourself, to get yourself thinking positive thoughts or practicing affirmations. Practice getting up in the morning and thinking seven new thoughts.

Or get up in the morning and focus on your goals. Write down all your goals. Get up in the morning and just look at them and read them. Or get up in the morning and just be aware. Just get up in the morning and listen, pay attention to what is going on in your brain and look at it for what it is. Don’t judge yourself for what it is, just look at it. Just be curious because that will put you in the present moment. There is so much power to happen in the morning.

[0:29:30.1] Don’t be at the effect of your brain. Don’t be at the effect of your beta condition. Don’t get up and go, “Ugh,” and imagine that that’s what you’re going to be stuck with, right? Get up in the morning and go, “Ugh – oh! That’s my brain doing. That is my brain going on autopilot and thinking thoughts that are creating those emotions. Creating – causing me to feel this way. I am going to change deliberately what I think in the morning.”

And share your thoughts with me. Share your thoughts on the Elevated Alpha Society Facebook group page. I’d love to take the conversation over from there. Now look, brother, if you are ready to commit to taking this work to a deeper level and elevating your alpha so you can work in freedom and live the life of your dreams, go to my website, thealphamalecoach.com and check out the Elevated Alpha Society Spartan Agoge program.

It is right there at the top. Look at the menu. It is right there on the tabs. This is a one year commitment you make to your personal development that will change your life forever. Now make no mistake brother, this is a lifestyle change and you will do the hard work. I don’t call it the Agoge for nothing. You will do the work. I make the commitment to you as your coach and you make the commitment to yourself. You can accomplish anything once you believe you deserve it.

And brother, you deserve to have everything the world has to offer. So sign up for the program right there on the website or book a 45 minute free consultation with me and you can ask me any question. We can coach on it and until next week, elevate your alpha.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:31:15.0] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Alpha Male Coach Podcast. If you enjoyed what you’ve heard and want even more, sign up for Unleash your Alpha: Your guide to shifting to the alpha mindset, at the alphamalecoach.com/unleash.

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