Brendan Marinelli
This article was originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of ICON/REFINED. Get your copy here.
Written by Brendan Marinelli
When you’re working on building healthy habits and becoming a high-performing entrepreneur, it’s important to remember that this transformation doesn’t happen overnight. The small details often make the biggest difference, setting great entrepreneurs apart from the rest. Cultivating discipline is key to making these changes stick.
One of the best ways to develop high-quality habits is to weave positive behaviors into your daily routine. Many successful entrepreneurs swear by practices like morning movement, improving sleep, setting clear time boundaries, tracking progress, attending networking events, continuous learning, and cutting out distractions. By sticking to these habits, you’ll boost your confidence and feel more in control.
Prioritizing these habits helps create structure and organization, leading to higher performance. As an entrepreneur, managing your time and energy well is crucial, and focusing on these areas can greatly increase your productivity and overall success. The more you integrate these habits into your daily life, the more you’ll see improvements in how productive and successful you can be.
Morning Movement
Moving the body right when you get out of bed in the morning is an ideal way to increase blood flow, reduce muscle stiffness, decrease anxiety levels, and release the “feel good” dopamine and serotonin hormone levels to enhance your mood. Building the habit of morning movement is a healthy decision that will keep your mind sharp and may increase energy levels and work productivity throughout the day. High achievers and top performers understand that a body in motion keeps the mind’s thinking process in motion. This may spark innovative ideas for your business. Creating a habit as simple as waking up and walking for 20 minutes is a commitment that may contribute to increased heart health, confidence, and cognitive functioning before entering the first work meeting of the day. Keeping physical activity a high priority will help you feel your best while staying fully charged and energized to conquer the work day ahead.
Try This: Create a quickie morning workout that can be completed as your coffee brews. We like performing five push-ups, 10 squats, three tricep dips, and five crunches before taking our first sip.
Enhance Your Sleep Cycle
When building healthy sleeping habits, one way to help aid this process is by preparing the bedroom environment for success. Utilizing blackout curtains before sleep significantly decreases light exposure, which may negatively affect the eyes and disrupt sleeping cycles. Another habit to aid restful sleep is shutting off all electronic devices in the bedroom to avoid excess amounts of blue light exposure. This will reduce digital eye strain and prepare the body for a restful sleep. Implementing the daily habit of avoiding big meals and restricting alcohol and caffeine consumption two hours before bed may enhance the sleeping experience and recovery process. Lowering and cooling the room temperature increases circulation and muscle relaxation to help acquire deeper sleeping patterns. Utilizing the bed strictly for sleeping and intimacy purposes is a great way to program the mind and body that the bed’s one and only purpose is for rest and relaxation. These habit-building techniques will enrich the rest and recovery process and help you operate at peak performance.
Try This: Take 10-15 minutes to journal before bed. Not only will this help you “brain dump” to avoid a racing mind before sleep, but it’ll also encourage you to put your phone away at bed time.
Create Time Boundaries
Another essential quality high achievers possess is the ability to create balance within their personal and professional lives. Creating and sticking to healthy boundaries is critical to avoiding burnout and enhancing work-life balance. Scheduling and dividing the day into blocks of time is a great tool to help organize and maximize productivity in all areas of your life. Time blocking can be dedicated to small bite-sized time slots to focus on checking emails, working on a specific project, taking breaks to walk and clear the mind, or other critical high-priority areas in your life. Dividing the day into smaller chunks of dedicated time to each objective may decrease your anxiety levels throughout the week so that you can perform to the best of your ability year-round. This habit will help you feel a sense of control and create a more structured and less stressed calendar you can be proud of.
Try This: We’re big fans of the Pomodoro method. To do this, simply set a timer for 25 minutes and dedicate the entire time just to one task (don’t even look at your phone, we mean it). When the timer sounds, take a five-minute break before getting back to it.
Track Progress
Creating a performance goal for your business is one skill set, but spending time tracking the goal’s daily and weekly progress is another. Building and dedicating time within the day to journal is a great way to stay connected to your goals. Taking 5-10 minutes a day to revisit your goals is a great protocol and tactic to monitor the execution and process of the current goal. High achievers make sure to put their best work forward, meet project deadlines, and overdeliver on the current expectations. Incorporating the habit of daily journaling is an opportunity to alter and adapt the original goal to evolve and elevate the entrepreneur’s work to reach peak performance.
Try This: Find the best journaling method that works for you. Whether you love a bullet journal, prefer a giant desk calendar, or like a heavy-duty agenda that structures your day minute by minute, the more your journaling method resonates with you, the more likely you are to stick to it.
Network
High-performing individuals invest and incorporate time into their weekly and monthly routines to collaborate with other top-achieving professionals within their field. This can be attained through attending a business conference, speaking at a mastermind event, or being invited to share your expertise with an audience on a podcast. Creating the habit of following up with an email after an event is another excellent behavioral change and habit that puts you in the best position to connect and grow with top professionals in the industry. Joining an online community with top performers in your field is another great way to build strong connections with individuals in your industry. Implementing this habit of collaboration will help spread knowledge and awareness to everyone in the field.
Try This: Remember that networking goes both ways. You should of course spend time reaching out to people to find out how they can help you, but great entrepreneurs also consider “How can I help someone else?” Challenge yourself to help or support one person every single day.
Continuous Learning
When it comes to high-performing individuals at the top of their craft, adapting and absorbing new information in constant change is essential to success. With technology moving quicker than ever, keeping up with the latest apps, marketing tools, and social media advancements is more urgent. Scheduling time in the day to learn a new skill set is a habit that may give you the edge you need to attract your next client and grow your business. If you love to read but are crunched on time, adding the daily habit of pairing your commute time with an educational learning experience can help. This may consist of listening to audiobooks on the train ride to work, on a lunch break, or driving back from work while in traffic. The idea is to maximize the downtime in the day with helpful information to sharpen your mind and continuously perform at the highest level possible.
Try This: Ever heard of microlearning? It’s when you take just 5-10 minutes to commit to reading an article, watching a video, or playing a skill-building app. Totally manageable, and there’s no excuse not to do it.
Eliminate Distractions
High achievers are hyper-aware of every distraction that comes into their life. Mindless scrolling on social media, watching a Netflix series, or talking to a coworker about something irrelevant to your goals are all prime examples of how valuable time is lost within the day. To perform at peak performance, habits should be built to eliminate distractions and be replaced with productivity actions when identified. Entrepreneurs are always busy and looking to free up time within the workday. Replacing a distracting behavior with a productive one may promptly move you closer to your long-term goals. Other ways to help aid the mind may include keeping a clear, organized desk, wearing headphones to cancel out outside noise, or setting up a workstation free from distractions to tap into deep work. All of these methods may increase workflow and productivity. Distractions are everywhere, battling for our attention. Solving distractions and recentering focus is how entrepreneurs reach peak performance.
Try This: Get mindful about your work day. Oftentimes, we’re overloaded with distractions that vie for our attention. Instead, when you’re working, shut off notifications, close unnecessary tabs, and let others know you’re in a distraction-free space. When you’re not working, make a point to be just as present to boost your work/life balance.