Morning Prompts
Gratitude & A Daily Goal
Gratitude – Morning Prompt
Direction: Write down one thing that you are grateful for, and why you are grateful for it to improve the start of your day.
Reasoning: Starting your morning contemplating something that you are grateful for is a wonderful way to begin the day with a positive mindset. Making yourself examine your life for people and things that you are grateful for helps you to realize that blessings abound. It’s natural for people to notice everything that’s wrong – it’s how they know what they need to change, or prepare for in their life, but it also means that it is necessary to consciously choose to focus on the good to enjoy your life, and increase your peace of mind.
Personal Note: On mornings I took an extra couple of minutes to write about one thing I was grateful for, and why I was grateful for it, I found that the mood boost I’d receive lasted for several hours in the morning.
Improvement or Accomplishment – Morning Prompt
Direction: Write something that you’d like to accomplish or improve today.
Details: Your daily goal can be something big or small, as long as it is something you can realistically accomplish. It can be something that you want to get done, which has the benefit of taking something off of your mind, and improving something small in your own life. It should not be related to your job in any way unless it directly benefits you, like finding a mentor, a career discussion, etc.
Some ways you may find this prompt helpful include: building healthy habits, learning new skills, tackling reading lists, or finishing projects by consistently meeting achievable daily goals until it’s completed. This may give you something that you can feel accomplished about, no matter what else happened during the day.
Personal Note: I have noticed that the state of my apartment (or living space) directly reflects how I am feeling internally. Although I am not sure which causes the other, I try to prioritize tidying everything up when I notice things starting to get a little messy as this seems to help me mentally as well. Start paying attention to what slips when you feel ‘off’ and how you can address it in small improvements for a few days.
I have also realized that this can help me focus on developing good habits, or mastering a skill I’ve made it a goal to learn. When I decide that I want my improvement to become a habit, and maintain it long term, then I may write the same improvement every day until it becomes as much a part of my daily routine as brushing my teeth.
Evening Prompts
Positive and Proactive
Positive – Evening Prompt
Direction: Write one positive thing that has happened to you today.
Details: This may be something that you did for yourself, like taking a walk on a beautiful day, or something that someone else did for you or anything else that improved your day. It can be something small, such as your coffee tasted particularly good this morning, or something life changing like a new job. Regardless of what it is, focus on recognizing one thing that brightened your day.
Personal Note: I found that this helped me start recognizing the good things that happened throughout the day, instead of just focusing on the negative.
Proactive – Evening Prompt
Direction: Reflect on the day and write one instance of when you were proactive.
Details: The goal of this prompt is to help you take charge of your own life, instead of giving forces outside of your control undue influence over your life. Although it may be difficult in the moment to admit to yourself that you are responsible for things you don’t like about your life, it is empowering in the long run because it gives you the strength to choose differently in the future.
While being proactive covers a wide range of behaviors, I focused on two in particular for this prompt. The first is not letting things outside of your control, including other’s actions, negatively affect your life more than absolutely necessary. The second is fixing things that you constantly complain about or doing something that you have always said you wanted to do, or always secretly wanted to do. It is proactively facing down your irrational fears, and leaving your comfort zone.
At the end of the day, before bed, reflect on the day and write one instance of when you were proactive. Somedays this will be a giant leap forward in your life, such as, “I emailed the recruiter at company X that I’ve always admired, and now have an interview next week” or it may be something small such as, “Traffic was terrible on my way home from work today, but when I noticed that I was started to feel aggravated, I took a deep breath, and listened to that TED talk I’ve been meaning to listen to instead, and came home feeling inspired instead of angry.”
Personal Note:
When I initially started focusing on this prompt, it felt like my life was out of my control for many reasons, including frustration and burn out from work. Instead of starting with the overwhelming task of not letting my bad days at work affect my life outside of work, I decided to start focusing every day on not letting bad drivers bother me. When I would feel anger or frustration at other drivers bubbling up, I would take a deep breath and remind myself that getting angry only affected me, and that they would never know how I felt about them. I would only be ruining my own day. Gradually, this ability expanded, and every day, when I would start getting angry or frustrated, I would ask myself, “Who am I affecting by these feelings?” If it was only myself, and it was something completely outside of my control, like the weather, or bad drivers, then I would focus on letting it go, and not letting someone else’s actions negatively affect my life.
I found that although I may have struggled to come up with something to write for the first few days, it wasn’t long until I would start holding myself accountable to be proactive at least once during the day. If I didn’t find a way to practice the first form, then I would search out a way to practice the second form of being proactive. It almost became a fun game for me to see what I could do each day that I could write about at the end of the day. Within a few weeks, I found myself becoming a calmer person, and less prone to becoming upset at small inconveniences. And then, almost unexpectedly, I found that I was able to handle the bigger problems too. I may not have been able to change how awful my job was, but I was able to not let a bad day at work ruin the rest of my day for me, and started to learn to leave work problems at the office. I also started reaching out to managers in any of the departments that had postings that looked interesting. Eventually, one of those postings turned into a new job that I enjoyed. Being proactive, in both aspects, is a powerful way to empower yourself to take control of your own life.
Start with small wins. If you don’t change it, you choose it.
OptimistPlanet 