1. Q: How many years young are you and what is your living situation?
1. 50 (in August 2019). I am married and have one child (teenager) living at home.
2. Q: What's the biggest challenge you faced in changing your morning routine? How have you dealt with it/got over it/are still dealing with it?
2. The biggest challenge was creating the routine after I woke up. The getting up was HARD but the WHY and WHAT TO DO now that I am up was the bigger philosophical challenge. Don't get me wrong, waking up was hard and I struggled and still do struggle now that I'm in the final laps of the journal. Disengaging from my family and responsibilities at night in order to get to bed "on time" is at times difficult. I like the morning hours I always have enjoyed being awake during the stillness of new day. The the real "a-ha moment" was realizing that the chores that I had to complete before my personal time was available for me to consume were simply that - chores. The chores were not the REASON for me to be awake and or the REASON for my day - they were the begin of the begin. The completion of those things needed to become robotic and unemotional. When I did that and made those chores simply a piece of morning I was free to fantasize about what the rest of my time was going to look like. It was incredibly liberating - it was like I was finally living for myself not the rote chores of a morning that was once cluttered but is now smooth and a launching pad to bigger goals.
3. Q: What time did you wake up and go to sleep before you started using the Morning Sidekick Journal, and what time do you wake up and sleep now?
3. Before: wake 6am sleep 10:30pm Now: wake 4:30-5am sleep 9:30-10pm
4. Q: What did your mornings look like before you started using the Morning Sidekick Journal? What do your mornings look like now?
4. Much the same, wake, make coffee, feed all the dogs (30), take child to school, house work, MWF go to job lots of energy spent trying to make a go of another day and trying to make the morning end so I could get along with life - whatever that was. They are less frantic and have much more positive energy. I have mastered the routinization of the chores. It can be harder some days than others but I am dedicated to maintaining the success and to tweaking the routine to include different pieces that are part of a bigger goal. Ex: training dogs for therapy dog certifications
5. Q: In one sentence, what's your favorite thing about the Morning Sidekick Journal?
5. My favorite thing about the journal is tactile - I love how it feels in my hands, the thickness of the paper and the binding.