So, I’m fairly new to the whole posting and blogging thing, but I do have written quite some evaluations the last few years for personal use. The coming time, I want to share some of my knowledge about personal development and share my point of view about certain things in life. This can be about:
how I try to be more productive, how I gain new skills, how to enjoy more of the moment and life itself or how I keep growing and expanding my comfort-zone.

Through these posts, I not only try to share my knowledge, but also try to gain some feedback or to hear some new perspectives that can help me to grow and to be a better person, lover, colleague and friend. One of my strongest believes is that the way you experience life, is mostly based on the thoughts that are going on in your own head. If you have a lot of positive thoughts, you’ll experience life positive. Your mindset and the daily habits that you have created as a person, influence those thoughts and thus also the way you experience your life. So with that being said, lets start one of my first posts about the positive habits that I have created and developed the last few years, which certainly improved the overal quality of my life and life experience. Here we go:

1. Standing up early
   Lets start with the least favourite of habits for most people, rise and shine early. While I certainly understand that most people love to stay longer in their bed, standing up early is one of my best and greatest habits that I’ve developed the last few years. This doesn’t mean that I’m always happy to stand up early, but since it’s a habit, I stand up early even when I don’t really want to. I used to strongly believe that I was the perfect example of a night owl. I’d rather stayed up late to work on a project or to study then to stand up early. Still I changed my way of living and changed from a night owl to a morning person. The biggest benefit of being a morning person, is that most people in the world are not. When you stand up at 6, 5 or even 4 am in the morning, the whole world is still quiet. There is no one there to bother you, no stress of getting to your work quickly, no annoying phones or e-mails that constantly ask your attention, it’s just you and the quiet peace of the early world. This gives you a calm start of the day, time to prepare and time to do all those things that you normally don’t have the time or energy for after a hard day of work. The start of the day is for me the most important moment of the day, since it has a big impact on your mindset or mental state for the rest of the day. Start your day calm, then your mind and the rest of the day is mostly also calm. The morning is also the moment that my brain, focus and energy level is on its best.
2. Start with the most important task of the day
   Since I stand up most of the time at 4 o’clock in the morning, I have a lot of time before my work even starts. This gives me the opportunity to do something that I find really important. This can be working on a personal project, having a quick morning work-out, meditation, mindset development or doing something that I totally love and are passionate about. This can change of course depending on my focus of that day. Another great thing is to start with the most annoying or biggest task of that day, or something that you have been procrastinating for a long time. For me the morning is also the moment that my mind is the least resistant, and doing something that I absolutely don’t like is weird enough the best way to start your day. Once you are finished, you are happy that you completed or at least started at that annoying task, which gives a great energy boost while going through the rest of your day. And while the whole world is still waking up, you are already at full speed.
3. Start the day with writing down your G.G.L.’s (Goals, Grateful for, Looking forward to)
   So when I start the day, I always take a short moment to think what my Goals are of that day. I think of 2 or 3 goals that will make my day a succes once I’ve achieved them. The rest is extra and extra fulfilling. I do this, so that I have a clear objective that I can finish and not end up trying to sprint a whole marathon. This is also really helpful when you are in a big project. By focussing on completing specific tasks, you are getting closer to success by simply one step at a time, which gives you a great feeling and makes the project more manageable. After I set up my goals, I’ll think about of what I am grateful for. No matter how hard your life sometimes can be, we most of the time forget how great our life is also at the same time. This helps you to create some inner-rest and to put things and life in general, in perspective. While you’re maybe worried about your iphone is broken, someone else is thinking about how he will get food for the upcoming day. I know it sounds cliche, but the best way to enjoy life is to be grateful for what you have. If we would trade all of our expectations for appreciations, our whole life would be a Miracle (Tony Robbins). The last thing that I do is to think about what I am looking forward to that day. This helps me to ease my mind, when I have a lot of things to do and when I’m almost stressed out. Since I know there is something fun that I can look forward to once I have finished all my objectives. If you cannot think of something fun that you are going to do that day, then you have to create something that you can look out to. I also think this helps to force you as a person to have some fun in life and also to be not so dead serious every second of your day. All of this, will take up max 7 minutes of your day, but will also be 7 minutes well spent. Personally I write them down every day in outlook, since I think that writing something down is more powerful then only thinking about it in your head, but it’s up to you of course what you prefer.
4. Read and hear something positive every day
   So I am a big fan of mindset development and of personal growth. The best way to grow is to learn from others, and to be surrounded by awesome people that will help you to grow. While it’s not always possible to be surrounded by wise or encouraging people, I make sure that I get my kick of positive energy, new knowledge or some great insight in my personal life, by reading 1 short article from some great life coaches everyday, or by listening to motivation video’s. This can be from some great influencers on Linkedin pulse, youtube video’s from some great speakers or some awesome bloggers that post new articles about personal development every few days. This also doesn’t have to take more then 15 minutes. But by dedicating these 15 minutes everyday, I make sure that I start each day with some positive energy and also learn a few new things. Sometimes I also get these great insights and slightly start changing my life again, because of the new knowledge that I acquired.
5. Prepare your next day
   So one of the last tips is preparing your next day. This is a simple one, but not done by many, and a lot of times not even by me ;). Preparing your next day can be several things, this can be planning out how your next day is going to start, creating time-boxes that indicate at which time you’re going to work on which project, or it can be as simple as making your lunch for the next day so that you don’t have to do that anymore in the morning. While I can think of 1000 examples, the point is that preparation saves a lot of time and also energy. The best way to start your day, is to wake up and to be able to start directly at the things that you want to do since you already prepared and planned beforehand. This way you can focus your energy directly at getting things done, instead of figuring out again what you were suppose to do that day. Since most day’s have a common routine or reoccurring events, the preparation of these days will also be more simple once done several times. Even though everybody knows that preparation is important, we most of the time don’t do it for our personal lives. By implementing it also in our personal life and by making a strong habit out of it, you’ll be able to simplify your life so much. And I think that is one of the things that we do miss a lot nowadays.

Alright so those where 5 of my positive habbits that I do every day. Hopefully you got something out of this post, and please share your thoughts on this article by dropping a comment below. In future articles I’ll probably go more in depth on some of these points, since there are a lot of ways to enhance these habits. For now I thank you all for reading this article, wish you all the best and hopefully see you next time.

See ya