Bonus Episode 17: Your Morning Routine and Habits to Improve Your Day

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Hi, this is Stephen McLain of the finance leader podcast. This is bonus episode number 17. This week I am bringing you an encore episode about habits as a part of talking about our morning routine. What we do after we wake up for the day, it sets us up for what we can accomplish. I know that everyone's situation is different out there with respect to young children and our significant other, and you may be facing other challenges too. So do the best you can with what you will be facing every day. As we all know, the workday is a combination of what we do control and what we don't control, we can prioritize the tasks we know about. And we know that in finance and accounting, that requests for information and analysis will come from all over the company. This is what we don't control, we have to be ready to reprioritize new requirements. Our morning also depends on the previous night.

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So I hope you get good rest every night. Our morning should consist of preparing our body, mind and spirit for the day. All three are important when we go to face the challenges ahead of us. For our body. We need exercise, yoga, or another program to get us moving.

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Schedule at least 20 minutes it helps with stress. And we really need this. Talk with your doctor what is best for you regarding exercise, whether it's walking, jogging, weightlifting, biking, or yoga. Since we may be sitting most of the day, getting exercise is critical to our health. Additionally, we need to eat a healthy, balanced breakfast, not just carbs and caffeine. I love that too. But it's not going to get us through the tough requirements that we have every day. We can do this sometimes. But you also need to get that healthy, balanced breakfast a few times a week.

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Talk to a dietician or your doctor for what's best for you.

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Now for your mind, you need a creative outlet to get your brain functioning. Your brain needs exercise to, you can do journaling, reading, watching a TED talk, something to get you thinking and pondering ideas, to get the fog out of your brain and to get those brain connections going. This is also very important. For your spirit, you need an uplifting exercise.

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And I will leave that up to you based on your life philosophy.

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Don't forget your spirit. It affects your positivity and approach to life. It affects your attitude towards others.

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Never forget your inner spirit for it will come out later as you speak to people exercise your inner spirit to for the workload ahead of us. We need to prioritize our tasks and prioritize our focus. also build in time for what you don't control. Because we know we will get requests from hire it's part of the job and we have to be ready. Plus you need to check on your team and have time for yourself to think and plan. Our morning routine is important. It sets up our day for success and having the right attitude, exercise, eating healthy at creative outlet, and also building up our spirit for positive interaction. It's all important for our hectic days to be successful. Now please enjoy this encore presentation of Episode 23 of the finance leader podcast. Five great habits to improve your day. I'll see you next week. Have a great week and go lead your team. Thank you.

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This week I am talking about habits. Habits define our commitment and often define who we are changing your habits is a deliberate process. encouraging your team to change their habits to begin with you are the leader.

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I believe that the motivation to improve our habits begins with our mindset and how we view ourselves. And Joe the episode today. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host Stephen McLain. This is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. This is episode number 23 and today I will discuss the importance of positive habits. And I'm going to be recommending five habits that you can include in your day. Number one, your morning and end of the day routines.

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Number two, what are you doing to reduce stress number three, time management. Number four, do you have written down goals and number five, create open and honest communication with your team Aristotle said, excellence is an art one by training and habits. How can we create a culture of winning, which includes the best habits, respect for others, and the encouragement to perform your best and the comfort to share ideas, even the revolutionary ones, your team's culture starts with you. Our habits often define who we are, we want to have winning habits because they become routine, it's often hard to start a new good habit and hard to stop the bad habits, we often become a robot, just executing the same bad habits every day. And it takes commitment to change our habits.

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Changing a habit is a deliberate process, because it takes discipline, and dedication. So we avoid complacency and habits that don't encourage winning, and excellence, we often fall into a routine and by definition, habits are routine.

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We need to redefine our motivation. I want to ask you a question. What value are your current habits delivering with the current habits that you have every day? What value are they bringing to what you get done every day, I want you to think about that. What is missing in your habits? What can you change to add more value to your day, and encourage your team more as the leader, your own attitude and approach to work sets the tone for everyone on your team.

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And it sets the tone for how people see their work, and sets the tone for possibilities. Our habits should help us achieve our vision. Because our vision then becomes our purpose. And our purpose is what drives us every day. Because without purpose, there is no motivation, and no clear direction for the work we are doing. And we start with ourselves on how we approach our work. We bring positivity, we bring enthusiasm for our work. We also encourage others, we encourage ourselves, we bring accountability to the tasks that are given out. As the leader we set the direction, the speed and the level of excellence that we want. And what we put in is what we get back. Everything that we put on our team, we will get back everything we put into ourselves, we will get back if we have high expectations. And we treat our team with dignity and respect. And we also encourage winning habits. And we also encourage value added processes each day that you can expect to have that high level of expectation met, not only by ourselves, but also by our team members, in any discussion around changing habits will always include a discussion around our mindset. how we view ourselves is how we see our future and how we treat others.

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Our success and potential for success begins with how we believe in ourselves. Do you believe that you deserve what you have? And where you are a mindset shift from feeling unconfident to confidence, how can we also carry a team that may be facing the same doubt, we begin to tell ourselves that we deserve to be here. And we deserve the success that we have. And we go forth and creating an environment of learning and winning. And that begins with us, our team will help us accomplish the work even on the worst days, when we make it a habit to treat people with respect and dignity, I'm going to share with you now, five habits that I believe that can make your day better and make your work productivity better.

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Number one, let's talk about your morning and end of the day routines. Now I'm specifically talking about your work routines. But this can also include how you begin the day at home, how you begin the day before you log on and how you end the day at home. Well after you've already logged off. Now these routines definitely go together what you do in at the end of the day affects what you get done, and how well you get it done. And the morning, how do you set your day up for success?

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did it begin the night before?

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did it begin before you finished your work for the day? And before you logged off? Do you have a to do list of what needs to be done during the day. And you have to ask yourself before you log out, do you know what you are doing tomorrow in the morning, what I usually do is that I'll check and see what emails have come in and then I'm going to prioritize answering them or maybe not answer them at all. I'm not going to spend all my time answering them and I'm going to put them in that priority order and only put my effort to any emails that came in that are highest in priority.

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We can get wrapped around and constantly looking, reading and trying to answer emails that don't add any value or that are lowest in priority. Make sure you are prioritizing these emails because they will take your time away and they will take the priority away from something that's more important also in the morning. I like to continually check and not Date my calendar, I want to know what's going on, you should be able to keep your work products organized. And keep good notes on meetings and make sure you are set up for success for the day. I also like to start early before everyone else. And before the crazy begins, I am a morning person. And my best hours are immediately right away after I wake up. And the key to getting your work done in an efficient and effective manner, like I said before is prioritizing your tasks. And prioritizing what takes your time during the day.

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So I want to encourage you to be looking at your morning and end of the day routines. When you close out for the day when you have logged off or right before you log off. What is the schedule for the next day? What meetings Do you have to attend?

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Do you have all the resources do you need? Do you have the answers to the questions that are going to be asked? Do you have the agenda? Do you also know what tasks are coming due?

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Do you have anything due the next day that you have not considered or closed out? Do you have time to complete these tasks, look at what you can do right now before you log off, to set yourself up for the next day. And then in the morning, you look at your calendar, and you see if there's any changes that have occurred. And then you see what's going to take your time and what's on your calendar. And then you prioritize and you ensure that you're allocating the right amount of time to each task. And I also want to encourage you as leaders, that we need to be understanding about our team members who have small children, and empathize and be understanding about what they are going through in the morning to get their little ones off to school, or what other activity that they may be going to, I want to share a story with you.

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When I was a commander in the army. My unit usually started

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30am, which was actually mandated to me from a higher headquarters, I did have one female soldier who had a baby that needed to be a childcare. But the childcare on the base didn't open until 530.

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So I excused her to be late until she safely dropped off her baby at childcare. Now this was an unpopular decision by others by other leaders. But I stood by my decision because this was easy to support her challenge, why would I make things harder for her. This is why I'm encouraging you to also empathize and understand some of the situations that your team members may be in. And so you can do your best as leader to support their routine that they are going to be going through each day. habit number two, is that I'm encouraging you to have some type of midday energy boosts so that you can reduce your stress, is there something that you can do during the day to reduce your work stress, because we are all dealing with this, we all are trying to figure out some way to reduce stress, overcome it, and somehow make our day a little bit easier to deal with with all the requirements that are coming at us. Maybe that's talking with a friend or eating a healthy snack. Are you able to exercise during the day? What else can you do to relieve stress? What activities that you are doing that are not helping with your stress? And can you reduce those I want to share with you another story. My last duty assignment in the army was at the Pentagon and had a very proactive stance on how you dealt with stress during the day. Because the Pentagon was a pressure cooker and some of my peers would exercise during midday someone would take a walk around the outside ring of the Pentagon, my approach would always be to exercise but I always exercise in the morning. And that always set me up throughout the day.

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And additionally, I always like to talk with my teammates, or sneak off to get a coffee.

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That's how I approached reducing my stress when I was in the Pentagon. Additionally, when I worked at a corporate office, not too long after I retired from the army, we were all encouraged to take walks during the day. And I did that this definitely helped. It's helped reduced the stress during the day. And it just helped me set up my afternoon for success. And so I'm encouraging you based on your needs and likes. What can you do to help you reduce stress during the day and it may be just walking away for about 15 minutes and kind of just thinking through some things or just going again, talking with a friend or just going outside for a walk if you can, if you have the if you have the ability to go do that. So again, just figure out some way that you can have stress reducing activities throughout the day. And then that will just set your entire day up for success. habit number three is about time management.

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I talked a lot about time management during the first habit that I encourage you and that's about your morning and end of the day routines.

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Continually will encourage you to protect your time is what you are doing the most important use of your time what you spend your time on. becomes your priority, we need to make sure that the allocation of tasks and priorities add value and supports the organization's vision. When we train, and then trust our team, it becomes easier for us to look at the tasks that we are responsible for. If you don't have a trained team, and a team that you can't trust in a team that you haven't built around trust or around empowerment, that means you're going to be spending time working on the tasks that your team members are. So again, protect your time by investing in your team, train them, and then trust them. And I want to ask you another question. What are you working on today? Is it the best use of your time based on the needs of the organization and your team, I have a recommendation. And that is to block out time on your calendar.

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So you can think and prioritize and walk through what you will accomplish. And also for resource decisions, I'm going to include a link from my blog that talks about blocking time on your calendar, even just to think and to think through some things think through requirements just so you can prioritize. You're not working on necessarily a task where you're planning your day, and you're planning your weeks and you're planning how you can train and also build your team.

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And you're just thinking and then maybe just sitting back in your chair, or maybe taking a walk and kind of thinking through some processes, and thinking through the most important things that you need to do or thinking through a solution to a problem that you have. So again, why don't you just encouraged to go ahead and find some time on your calendar every week, block it out, don't have anything else don't work on a task. Just think and think about what's going on with your team. And think about what's going on in your organization and your department, and how you can best allocate your own time and your resources to make things better on your team. And it makes things better in the capacity and in the responsibility that you have as a leader. So look for the link in the description of this episode about the blog post that I talked about, and blocking out your time on calendar, so you can have some time to think for yourself. habit number four is to have written down goals. Now I've talked about written down goals before and in previous episodes of this podcast. So I won't go into great detail. But when you have written down goals, you have a plan to achieve the things that you want to get done in your career and in your life. So what is your plan to achieve your major long term goal and around written down goals gives you a roadmap for what you want to do in your career. And also gives you additional purpose and direction for what you want to do with your team and with the time that you have. So I encourage you write down your goals update often with your progress. And I recommend that you talk with your supervisor about your goals, because you'll be pleasantly surprised that your supervisor may actually help you with goal achievement.

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Additionally, as leader, you need to have your own individual development plan. And you need to ensure that your team members each have one it is your responsibility as the leader that each one of your team members had an has an individual development plan. And they have their goals. And they have a plan on how they want to accomplish their goals and what training and requirements and skills that they need to develop and share. You're also developing in our craft on the technical side and with your leadership skills. Now, finally, with habit number five that I want to talk about, which I believe may be the most critical in developing a winning culture, I want you to be talking with your team and to encourage open and honest communication. And that is based on dignity and respect. I want you to communicate often and communicate clearly share critical information quickly.

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And if you do, and if you do it often. And if you do share the most relevant information with your team, you will gain credibility. What I want you to think about and which I have said before is that how do you get ideas or even information from your team that can help you get your job done, or that can be the one great idea that can improve the organization as a whole. And I'm talking about that revolutionary idea. And in order to get that revolutionary idea from your team members.

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What has to happen on your team is that they need to feel safe, they need to be able to feel comfortable in sharing ideas that they're not mocked or made fun of or someone will discourage it or have some kind of a bullying incident on the team. You need to understand that as leader your team knows what works and what doesn't in the processes that you have. If you treat your people wrong, then you'll never get the input that you desire that you need.

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You will miss out on the best ideas that may in fact be a game changer for your own career and for what can happen on your team. Your people do know what to say And how to fix it, and what works and what doesn't. So let them talk create an environment where they can talk openly and freely, and no one's going to bully them, no one's going to discourage them from bringing the great ideas. If people don't trust you, or trust the other members of their team, then they won't share information. If they get bullied by others, they won't share anything at all. And it may be that you offer them the opportunity to share ideas and their one on one sessions during the one on one sessions, you probably need to be allocating most of the time for them to speak so that you can get the best information and the best ideas and the best recommendations for improving processes. And how we do get those revolutionary ideas is that we show appreciation for every idea that comes in, even if you're not going to implement it or use it or if it's an idea that's just horrible and terrible. We still continue to show appreciation that the person spoke up and shared, what they believe is important.

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create an environment where people feel comfortable speaking up about where they believe the team should be going over the organization should be going and also to get the ideas that you may never hear in another process. Make sure you are having the one on one conversations with your team members. We have talked about one on ones before, have them as often as you can, and often as you can schedule on the calendar. And during the one on one sessions. You can talk about correcting poor performance, and you can talk about your vision and also want you to continue to get to know your people and allow your team members during these one on one sessions, to talk about things that can be improved and talk about their goals and their progress in any type of areas that they're having trouble on with a task or any additional guidance that they may need from you. I have a free guide for you. It's called the leadership growth blueprint for finance and accounting managers. In the guide, I talked about three leadership areas communication, team growth, and empowerment. Plus a few recommendations around challenges with the systems you are probably using to complete your work. The link to the guide is in the episode description.

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Or you can go to Stephen mclain.com. Please use it to help you with a few leadership wins today. Thank you. All right, for an easy one. Today, I want you to ask yourself, what positive habits can you add or change into your daily routine to improve yourself and to improve your team? I want to talk about winning habits during your one on one sessions with your team members, solicit their advice and also ask them on how you can improve the team's communication and also the team's habits and processes.

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This episode is sponsored by my new online course offering through finance leader Academy.

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It's called Advanced your finance and accounting career.

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Developing a promotion strategy that will set you apart Are you having difficulty getting recognition from your leadership, despite all the hard work you put into your job in your organization. This course helps you analyze what you bring to the organization. How you can set yourself apart from your peers to high visibility work, and developing your leadership skills. Plus how you can devise a strategy to move ahead, you can go to Stephen mclain.com for more details. today. During this episode, I discussed five habits that you can incorporate into your life and into your daily routine. The first one was to look at your morning and end of the day routines have been number two was how you can reduce your stress during the day number three was about time management. Number four have written down goals and number five, how to improve communication on your team. Next week, I'm going to discuss how to disagree professionally with your boss. One more area that I would like to discuss is that if you've had a setback recently or this year in your career, or your personal life, this setback does not define you. setbacks are a part of life. setbacks can make you stronger when we overcome adversity. It gives us more confidence and strengthens our mindset. overcoming adversity will strengthen your resolve to come back even stronger and better than before.

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You need to show persistence for your goals and what you want for your life. You can do it be strong. I want to encourage you to whatever you're facing whatever setbacks you are dealing with this year that you can overcome it. You can overcome whatever obstacles that have been put in your path this year. Be persistent. Focus on your goals and get it done.

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You can do it. I believe in you.

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I hope you enjoy the finest leader Podcast. I am dedicated to helping you grow your leadership. Hope you enjoyed the show. You can get this episode wherever you find podcasts.

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Until next time, you can check out more resources at Stephen McLain calm and sign up for my updates so you don't miss an episode of the show. And now go lead your team and I'll see you next time. Thank you Good morning.

Bonus Episode 17: Your Morning Routine and Habits to Improve Your Day

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