The secret sauce to showing up

Coach Sall

Last week I told you about the award I won (thank you for your congratulations by the way) and promised I would share the secret sauce of showing up.

I won the award for the business equivalent of a 30-minute workout, that is 90 minutes of focussed work on my business – no e-mail, no social media, no interruptions.

Now I’ll be honest here, I’ve been trying to shoehorn this into my day for a while now. Ideally, it’s to be done very first thing, before anything else shows up or blows up (you know the things, because it doesn’t just happen to business owners, right?).

My schedule just didn’t lend itself to doing that (I told myself).

So, I tried other times, quieter times in my day.

Of course, they didn’t work, because by that time something had distracted me, and man, I am easily distracted, especially from doing something difficult (I’m sure you can relate 👀).

I knew what the answer was, it had been on my mind for a long time, the answer was doing it first thing, and that meant getting up earlier, really early.

So that’s what I did.

I got up really, really early and I mean really early. And you know what? I hate it every morning. But…

I’ve thought about what I’m doing the night before, I’ve connected the task ahead to my goals and my reason why, I’ve laid everything out ready, and I’ve spent the time it takes to brush my teeth to renew my commitment to this process before I go to bed.

There’s 30 seconds when I first half wake up, I could change my mind, but I don’t, because my sub-conscious is telling me this is an opportunity and any excuse my barely conscious brain can come up with is invalid.

By the time my backside hits the chair I am all in for the 90 minutes and nothing is going to stop me.

That’s how I did it, and you can do it too.

You see, the ritual isn’t in getting up early, it’s not in the 90 minutes (or the 30-minute workout), it’s in what I do the night before.

My ritual, that leads me to take the action I need to take, is completed before I even fall asleep.

I’ve made the getting up easy, it makes it repeatable, there’s no way I’m going to skip it, it’s as good as done before it's even done ✅

Coach Sall celebrating 1000 workouts with Nena - that’s a LOT of showing up!