The lifestyle I had been living changed in an instant.

What worked no longer suited our new reality. And now I needed to find something that allowed me to embrace our lifestyle change and yet still felt like me.

This was a fresh start, time for something new.

When I first read “Change your Day Not your Life” by Andy Core, we were in our first semester of home schooling. And I had been experimenting with my lifestyle.

This book couldn’t have come at a better time.

So much vies for our attention today. And unless we have a way of dealing with what comes our way, overwhelm is what lies ahead for us.

Feeling like you have a million and one things to do everyday, isn’t far from the truth.

Everywhere we turn someone needs or wants something from us. And a lot of it is good. Add to that a change on job, location, or some other lifestyle factor, and things can really spin out of control.

Living a good life isn’t automatic. Nor is it likely unless you’re in control of your day.

This is where I found myself when we started home schooling.

It was a family choice, one we chose on purpose and for really good reasons. And yet I still had to face, we all had to embrace, what we were going to do about our new lifestyle.

I knew that the first few months would set the tone for our life ahead. We had this amazing opportunity before us to create a life we really enjoyed and that was life giving.

Andy’s book helps you do just that. He gives you the insight into how you can create a life you love to live, by focusing on the choices we make in our day.

Unless you become aware of the triggers behind the decisions you’re making, and make a change, your guaranteed to keep on getting the same results.

The good news is you don’t need to change your life, just your day. And the compound effect of changing your day is a changed life.

So that’s what I had set out to do with this amazing opportunity for our family + my business. I took the pressure off and gave myself the time to experiment.

I challenged my preconceived ideas about the kind of person I was.

If you’d asked me, I would tell you I liked both early mornings and late nights. And it doesn’t take more than a few of them together to know that they don’t play nicely together.

Rather than let my feelings decided, I put this and many others ideas to the test. And what I found at times surprised me. I got to see how the results impacted my family and business in ways I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.

For instance, I discovered that while I enjoy the peace + quiet of late nights, and still have one on the occasion, I’m much better as a morning person. My creativity really shines when I’m fully rested from an early night. And seeing the sunrise during the summertime is more energising than you might think.

With a bunch of results from my experiments I was ready to dive into Andy’s book to help me settle on some decisions.

The one thing I took away from his insight was that whatever I put into my daily routine need to help me be the kind of person I wanted to be for me, my family + in business.

Because I knew that success comes from the consistent small actions you take everyday. And overtime they compound and help you create the kind of life you want to live.

what we do first matters

So I got out my notebook and wrote down the things I knew I needed to do on a consistent basis to be the best me I could be.

These were things that would help me stay in the flow of energy, motivation, inspiration and gratitude. My daily activities would feed + sustain my spirit, soul and body no matter what was happening in my day or the season of life I was in.

My morning routine consists of :

• exercise because it make me feel good, gotta love those endorphins
• bible reading and prayer as it centers me and feeds my spirit, mind and keeps my soul in check
• gratitude journalling, I start my day with thankfulness because it’s the doorway to joy and who doesn’t want to live a happier life

My day ends with :

• family time to connect and celebrate life together, they are the witnesses of my life (one of my favourite quotes from the movie Shall We Dance)
• reading + learning for continued growth
• planning tomorrow, I believe it’s the core of living a productive + purposeful life
• and I end my day with awesome, a habit of counting my blessings to remain grateful for the gifts I received each day

Gratitude has become the bookends to my day. No matter what happens in the middle, I don’t want to lose sight of the goodness of God in my life.

Gratitude does so much more in terms of personal growth, an optimistic attitude, good health, creative solutions to life’s challenges, and a joyful countenance just to name a few. Thankfulness is exercise for the heart, just like walking is good for the body.

Doing these things (almost) daily has changed my life + business for the better. To look from the outside, not a lot is different. We still live in the same house, home school, and I do the same work.

Life was pretty good back then, and it’s even better now.

Having a better business + life is all from making simple changes to your day, not your life.

I could have sabotaged our future and stayed in the rut of overwhelm, letting everyone and everything dictate how my day went

Life is simply a series of the decisions we make and their consequences. They build upon one another. Thankfully change doesn’t and shouldn’t happen all at once to create a lasting difference.

So you can create a better business + life by making one change at a time. There’s no special order or place to start. Just do the first one that pops into your mind right now.

And while Andy doesn’t specifically talk about it, daily reflection is the key for making those incremental changes that will change your business + life for the better.

At the end of each day ask yourself, “What could I do better?“, write it in your journal and let the answer be your guide. Keeping a record makes it easy to count your blessings and see the progress you’ve made.

Be sure to celebrate every win, big and small celebrate them all! And open the door to an unending joy that will fuel you as you create a better business + life.

You life is the result of the choices you made in your yesterday’s. Take a moment and think about the kind of tomorrow you want to be living and make a change today to get there. As they say, rinse and repeat.

All it takes is one choice each day that moves from where you are to where you want to be. Focus on the execution, not the outcome and change your day, not your life.

This is the kind of change that’s lasting so you don’t need a do-over.

Stop sabotaging yourself and create a better life + business, starting today!