63. How to stop letting your days happen to you

A slow, shame-free morning routine for ambitious leaders who are ready to take ownership of their day right from the start — even if you have ADHD, insomnia, or little ones waking you up at night.

This is my shame-free, grace-upon-grace framework to help you build the foundations necessary to turn holy ambition into surrendered, strategic action. And it ALL starts with sleep!

JOIN THE EARLY MORNING CLUB

Chapters:

00:00 The Struggle of Morning Routines
02:42 Intentionality vs. Surrender in Daily Life
05:21 The Importance of Sleep and Self-Care
07:59 Challenging the 'Not a Morning Person' Mindset
11:06 Taking Ownership of Your Time
13:52 Stewardship and Intentional Living
16:33 Embracing Flexibility in Routines
19:27 The Early Morning Club Framework

https://dustyhegge.com/morning

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

For years, and I literally mean years, like since I was a child, I truly beat myself up over not being a morning person. I'd set the alarm, I'd plan the routine, I'd buy a journal, and then, you know, life would life. As I became an adult, my babies would wake up or my toddler, like insomnia would creep in. I've struggled with insomnia since I was a child. My medications would shift to manage ADHD, or like, you know, like I said a second ago, life would just life. And I lay there early in the morning and I would just feel like a wave of failure and frustration and discouragement before my feet even hit the ground, before my day even started. And if that's you, I need you to know that it's not just a struggle with being a morning person. It's actually a lot deeper than that. And we're gonna get into it in this episode. And I'm really, really excited because this is a message that's really important on my heart. Like, because I've know you've heard a thousand times that you need a morning routine to be successful. That we've all heard the like 5 a.m. club and the like set the time back as early as you can and get the most of the time before your kids wake up, which like sounds great in theory, but like in practice, that's not quite that's not really realistic all the time, right? And so I am gonna share with you what has worked for me to become an early an early morning person, what I mean by early morning, and how you can kind of you can exactly steal my framework that has worked for me time and time again. And you can get the whole thing directly to your inbox where I'm gonna go into a lot more detail. I'm gonna give you direct links to products and tools that have really helped me. I'm gonna give you my whole framework, everything you need to know. And you can do that at dustyhaggy.com slash morning. But first, what I really need you to know is that this is not a challenge to get you to stop hitting the news button, the snooze button. Not news button. Is there a news button? I don't think so. This isn't meant to like get you to stop smashing that snooze. Though that is a teeny part of it. This is not a shame fest. I'm not gonna guilt you into saying that you need to wake up earlier in order to be successful because that's just a straight up lie. This is not about waking up early. It's about whether or not you're letting your day happen to you, or whether you're deciding to take ownership over your day, right? So by the end of this episode, my prayer and my hope is that you're either going to feel deeply seen and encouraged and really ready to take a small step forward towards this goal of setting those alarm clocks back a little earlier and taking more ownership and an and having a more intentional posture over the way your day happens so that it's not just happening to you, is I guess what I mean. Or by the end of this episode, you're gonna feel relief, permission to stay in bed for this season, to allow yourself to sleep in, to not force yourself to fit into this cookie-cutter morning routine and think that if you do force yourself into a cookie-cutting morning routine, then that is when you'll be successful. That's when things will unlock for you. That's when your life is gonna be better. Because that's just not true. The reality is that taking the time to be intentional and set a morning routine is a big win. And allowing yourself permission and stopping this horrible shame spiral of overwhelm and awful and allowing yourself to get the sleep you need right now, also a big win. In both cases, we are taking more ownership over our day. In both cases, we are walking forward with a lot more intentionality and a whole heck of a lot more surrender, right? And that's what this whole thing is about. That's why I started the early morning club. That's why it's really important to me. And if I think back to Little Girl Dusty, that's why I wanted to be a morning person because I know we can see biblical examples of the value of it. We can see practical examples in our day-to-day lives of the value of it. Like it is a wonderful goal to work towards. I am living proof of that. I have ADHD, I have three little kids who have not been easy sleepers in their baby and toddler years. I've always struggled with insomnia. Sleep is hard for me and always has been. And to some effect, I bet it always will be. But with this framework that I'm gonna share with you, it's very simple, very straightforward, very shame-free, very grace upon grace, and also like a loving kick in the pants. Because sometimes we need that, right? Sometimes we need to be reminded, like, no, we can do hard things. And at the other side of the hard, it's actually something really great. Sometimes the hard thing is just admitting that like right now isn't the time to prioritize getting your butt out of bed early, extra, like extra early in the morning, right? That is a hard thing to overcome, to let go of that shame. And sometimes the hard thing is being like, no, no, no, no, it's time. I need to start waking up earlier, right? So as we kind of dive into this, I hope that that you can kind of hold that in in mind and kind of evaluate your current season of life, right? So before I even go any further, though, I kind of want to take a second to identify like you probably already know the answer. If like you should be setting those alarm clocks earlier and starting to implement a morning routine. If you have a really, if you have a chronic illness, if you're pregnant, if you're recovering from anything, if you have little babies waking up in the middle of the night all of the time, I need you to know whether you have those circumstances in your life right now or not, that sleep is the most productive thing you can do for your health, for your family, for your business, and for your overall well-being, and even for your relationships with the people here in this earth and with your Heavenly Father. Sleep is so important. It matters a great, great deal. Like it matters a great, great deal. And once I finally came to a point where I was like, no, I am done trying to force myself to do something that nobody else is expecting of me that I'm placing on myself. I'm just gonna let myself sleep because I want to, when I am awake, be able to actually be in control of my emotions, be able to be in control of my impulses, be able to respond to my kids' incessant questions about when dinner is going to be with patience and with kindness. I want, like, that's me taking ownership over my day, right? Like that's me being intentional. And so to do that, I opted to let go of the shame of trying to get myself up early. Now, that doesn't mean I didn't have a morning routine. That doesn't mean I wasn't trying to be intentional with how I started my day, but it does mean I wasn't trying to do it at 5 a.m. anymore. Like I was just letting myself wake up when I needed to wake up, right? So we're gonna talk about that a little bit more. And when you go through the early morning club, which again you can get at dustyheggie.com slash morning, obviously a link in the bio for you. But you will, even if you are not implementing everything like exactly as I suggested, which like is kind of the point. Like I'm hoping that this whole framework for the early morning club is something that you can adapt and like modify to suit your unique season of life. And I give you a lot of use cases and ways that you can do that. But the hope is that whether you're implementing everything now or not, that as you go through these emails, that it provides you with a lot of encouragement. It provides you with a better perspective. It helps you to understand why this beautiful tension between intentionality and surrender is so important to turn your holy ambition into strategic action. And like ultimately, more than likely, that's why you're here listening to this podcast. That's why you're hanging out with me, which I love. Thank you for being here. It makes me so happy. And I really want to do everything that I can to support you in that. There are some lies that I I see often really holding people back, right? So, like, let's walk forward in this conversation with some discernment and knowing that there is no one size fits all, right? But something I hear a lot of people say is like, I'm just not a morning person. Like I can never wake up early. I am a night owl through and through. I'm the most productive at night. Like, I hear a lot of people say those things. Um, and I would really, I would really push back on that. Like I would really challenge you. Is it that you're actually the most productive at night, or is it that you've trained your body to have to get stuff done at a deadline because you're operating under high cortisol and stress levels? And rather than being able to work in a way that's easeful and inviting, and like, yeah, you got to get the stuff done. Sometimes a little bit of like time pressure is really important, especially for the ADHD year. But like, we don't have to always be working under intense amounts of pressure to get stuff done. No matter who you are or how you work, that's just not the way we were created. We're not meant to be under constant stress, whether it's self-imposed or imposed externally from other sources, right? And I find often when people say, Oh, I'm not a morning person, it's just because there's a lot of nuance here, right? So I wanna be, I wanna be careful with my words because there is some truth to that, like, right? Like you're not currently a morning person. But the like the lie that's held underneath that is like, I could never wake up early. I'm just not made that way. That's not my personality. That's not how I work. Being a morning person sometimes comes really naturally. My middle child is gonna wake up at 5:30 to 6, 6:30 every morning, no matter what. She's always been that way and she always be will be that way. My eldest daughter would prefer to sleep in. But in both cases, there's skills to be learned. Like learning how to take control over when and when you don't wake up. Like it's a muscle that you build and that you get better at. So if you're still listening to this, I'm assuming that you want to be a morning person. And if you're holding on to this lie that you could never because of X, Y, Z circumstances, I just challenge you to think that through and pray, like, and ask the Lord to reveal to you like what's the underlying thing you're believing here? Because becoming a person who has a fruitful early morning experience like this is a skill and it's a muscle that you build over time. It's not something you are or you are not. It's not tied to your identity in any way. And that's kind of the crux of the matter, right? It's a learnable skill to be a morning person. Secondly, you don't have to wake up at 5 a.m. or 4 a.m. to be an early morning quote unquote person, right? The idea is that you're waking up a little earlier than what's like crunch time. If you have to be out the door at 7:30 and you're waking up at seven, I'm gonna encourage you to get up a little earlier so that your 30 minutes of being awake isn't frantic and stressful and overwhelming. But instead it can be a little bit more restful and easeful, peaceful and grounded. And it can be a space where you're like not just like your day isn't just like coming at you like really quickly and fast and scattered and haphazardly, but instead it's coming at you as you've planned it. Like, and there's always stuff outside of our plan. But wouldn't it be better if something outside of our plan happens when you have an hour, hour and a half to get ready for the day than in 15 minutes? Because let's be real, you probably hit your alarm at seven or hit your snooze button at seven and you're actually getting up at 7.15 and you're like a scrambled frantic mess out the door and you're so mad at yourself for doing that. Let's let go of that, right? Like it doesn't have to be bonkers early before the sun is awake. You don't have to wake up then. If that's something that you want, that's a fine goal to work towards. But I just need you to understand that you can start waking up at your current time you're normally waking up, but doing so with more intentionality. And then slowly we're gonna inch that back to the goal wake up time, right? Like you don't have to be up at 5 a.m. That's not how this goes. The second sort of lie I see a lot of people live is they start to blame their kids. And I am guilty of this. So maybe I should speak from my own perspective. For a long time, I really sort of blamed my kids without saying those words out loud for my husband's schedule or my outside circumstances for like the reason why I could never get enough sleep or why I could never take control or ownership over my days, particularly over my mornings, right? And now there's some nuance here, right? So don't hear me say that those aren't important things to consider. I hope with the top of the show, I really made that clear. But and, but and we need to move forward with intentionality and surrender. And we need to take accountability for our pieces. If you're the if you're in a place where you feel like, oh, I could never wake up early because I have little kids and my spouse's schedule is weird, or like, you know, whatever the reasons are, I work the best at night, I get the most done really late at night. There's a certain amount of wisdom and discernment, like I said earlier, of like allowing yourself to understand what is the right or the wrong season of life to pursue an earlier morning routine, right? But don't hold yourself in this lie and play the victim and have this victim mentality around your time. When in actuality, what I'm encouraging you to do is to take ownership over your time and over the way you uh think about your time and offer all of your time up, 5 a.m., the 2 a.m. feedings, the 6:30 a.m. alarm that says you have to get up to, you know, start your day, whatever, right? Like, that you would be walking into those periods of your life and to those things, knowing like things aren't happening to me. This is me getting to live a really fruitful life in accordance to God's will. And when we allow ourselves to stay in this victim mentality, when we allow ourselves to say, like, well, it's not the right season, it's never gonna be the right season. Like, I'm just not gonna be able to be the person who does this because X, Y, Z. Like, I would really, again, encourage you to pray about that, to think about that, to kind of consider like, is that true? Or is that an excuse? Because waking up early is hard. It is a hard thing to overcome, especially if it's not been your normal for the majority of your life. And like me, you have wanted that forever and tried and failed and tried and failed. And so you're starting to tell the story that you just fail at it, at everything, maybe. I need you to know that like I have felt or thought or experienced each one of these things. And I understand very, very deeply how hard it is to overcome these. And that's why I feel so deeply about the early morning club. Because, and this is why I care so much about this. Because the way you start your morning, the way you view your time and the way you view your schedule is it's your calling in action. It's the discipleship lived out. I work with women who are building businesses and leading ministries and raising families. And every single one of them wrestle with this question of like, I don't have time. I can't do this all. I can't carry this all. Even right when I wake up in the morning, I immediately start to feel overwhelmed in shame and frustration at my day because I know I have this grandiose idea of what this day is gonna look like. That's picture perfect. But then before we even get out the door in the morning, everything gets dismantled. Same. I have been there. Like I really, really have been there. And you don't need a morning routine to live this God-honoring, beautiful, fruitful life. You just don't. You don't need it to be successful, you don't need it to be fulfilled, you don't need it to experience peace peace. Like you just don't need it. It's not something you need. But what you do need is to stop letting your day just happen to you and step into this role of leadership that God has blessed you with because he's asked for your like co-partnership and stewarding his kingdom. And that starts with your you, that starts with your family, that starts with your home. And then that can trickle out into your business, into your outside relationships, into your everything. So, like this concept of stewardship, this concept of starting our days with intentionality and taking ownership over our time, understanding that like we are not in control of time, but there are certain things that we can and have been invited to take control of, right? That's where that intentionality, peace, and surrender, sorry, that intentionality and surrender peace comes together, right? Is like we are gonna do our best to take accountability. We are gonna do our best to take ownership over our time and over our days in the very, very best way that we are able to with the resources and tools and seasons of life that we are in, and we are gonna hold our entire day loosely. We are gonna hold our schedule loosely and trust that our good and gracious God, when he redirects us and he gives us a course correction, or when, you know, your sister-in-law crashes and you have to cancel a client meeting and you have to drive all the way up to Seattle to help her out. Like, you don't have to come into that space feeling everything I planned today is going awful. You can be like, wow, I'm really grateful that I have the schedule and the ability to rearrange my day and go help my sister-in-law, whom I love dearly, out. It doesn't have to be a place of stress and contention. It can be a place of like, man, I'm so grateful I get to live this life that I get to live. This is actually what happened to me yesterday. Literally what happened to me yesterday. Um, and also like the same is true for like the 1 a.m. feeding. Like when you're nursing that baby at 1 a.m., you don't have to wake up and think like, like, I have so much to do tomorrow. There's no way I'm gonna get it all done now because I have to be up at 1 a.m. nursing and like get, I hope you get how much I understand that struggle. I I nursed three babies. I was up all night, every night with all three of them for way beyond what felt reasonable to me. Like those sleepless nights are hard. Whether you have a baby, whether you have a chronic illness, whether you have really heavy deadlines that are keeping you awake at night, instead of thinking this is gonna throw everything off. Like, I encourage you to pray and ask yourself, what is God inviting me into with this schedule shift? What is God trying to teach me? How is he meeting me in the midst of the weariness and of the exhaustion, of the like frustration that things aren't going to plan? Because it is frustrating. I'm not saying let's have rose-colored glasses about this. It's really hard to take ownership of our days because ultimately we don't own them, like God does. And he invites us to steward them, he invites us to take authority over them to a certain extent. And so we can obviously feel so frustrating when, like, okay, but you've asked us to steward this, but everything I try to steward, you're undoing or changing, or, you know, like I get that. And my encouragement to you is come to the Lord with that frustration. Come to the Lord with your questions and ask him to invite in you some curiosity. Like, how can you think about your day in a way that wrestles with this beautiful holy tension of intentionality and surrender? And honestly, this is a lot of the work I do with my clients, whether it's in a one-on-one mentorship or within the percolator. And that's why the early morning club matters so much because it's such a foundational piece to be able to turn holy ambition into strategic action. Like I get that, like, oh, an early morning routine seems so far removed from building the kind of life and business you really want, but it's actually the crux of the matter. Like it's actually the foundational, not so sexy, not really pretty, kind of uncomfortable, very difficult piece that doesn't have to feel impossible, especially when you join something like the Early Morning Club. And I get to come alongside you and support you and encourage you through this process of taking ownership over your day, of starting your day with more intention, right? So I do really encourage you to sign up for the Early Morning Club. It's a free email course spread out, not in a quick span of time, but about about two or three weeks. And within, I believe it's like the second email, I give you the full framework, right? And the reason at a high level view. And the reason is because after we sort of address some of these important mindset issues, I want to give you like a high-level view of like how the early morning club works, what we're working towards, and what we're gonna do now to set ourselves up for success when we work on it. I do the same thing when I help clients build out strategic plans or when I help them implement a lot of these things like in a mentorship and a one-on-one mentorship capacity, whether it's for business or for life, because like a lot of the key issues that I work with clients on is like feeling really frantic, feeling really scattered, feeling really overwhelmed. When I tell you what we're working towards, it's not because you have to be this like to the end of the goal right away. It's to help you keep in mind what you're working towards to get to the goal, like what needs to happen between now and between the end goal. The best example I heard, and I think I've said it before on the podcast, but I was doing a Pilates class and the instructor was like, if you're new, you might not be able to do this yet, and don't beat yourself up. But I want to show you what you're working towards so that way you can hold your body in such a way that gets you closer and closer and closer to the goal of what you're trying to do so that you can get the most out of this particular exercise. But if you're not ready for this like goal version of the exercise and you start too soon, it's gonna cause you a lot more pain and you're gonna skip some really foundational steps. And then you're gonna be uncomfortable and you're gonna be in pain. And like, we don't want that for you. And so that's what the early morning club is meant to do. It's meant to introduce to you a lot of the foundations. And that's why that like second, I think it's the second email in the sequence, um, that really gives you that high-level overview. And then throughout the next week or two, I'm gonna come alongside you in your inbox. And I would love it if as you get these emails, you reply to me. That would make me feel great, great, great joy. Let me know what feels like a sticking point to you, what feels really hard. If you're like, Dusty, like that sounds cool, but just does doesn't sound realistic. Help a sister out, I'm here for you. Or if you're like, this is so helpful, I'm really grateful for this, please tell me your wins. I would really, really love to hear that. You can sign up for everything at dustyhaggy.comslash morning. Just keep in mind, this is meant to. Be shame free. This is meant to be grace upon grace. This is meant to be, dare I say, fun. And I really believe that it can be fun. Because when we embrace and prioritize fun in our daily life, like, I'm not saying it's a cure all, but it's pretty hard to be sad and depressed when you're prioritizing fun, right? Like, it's nothing is magic about this, but it is pretty wonderful and pretty spectacular. So thank you so much for hanging out with me. I know this was a quicker episode, but I hope that it really encouraged you. I hope that it blessed you. I cannot wait to see you inside the early morning club. It's gonna be so much fun. When you sign up right now, you'll get an immediate email and you will be right off to the races. Um, and actually, one thing I really love about the early morning club is like I'm kind of restarting too. I've been in a season where I've not been able to, well, I've intentionally chosen to not wake up extra morning. We've had a lot of life events, like I've shared a lot of it before with a parental divorce and with a lot of grief and so many other really heavy, hard life circumstances that made me realize really quick like, sleep is hard for me to come by right now. There needs to be a season of me allowing myself to not get up early in the morning and prioritize better sleep so that I can show up for these hard things better. And now I'm in the point where sleep is still hard for me. But it's time for me to put my big girl pants on. It's time for me to take more ownership over my days in this particular way. And I'm excited that I get to do it right alongside you guys. It always makes the early morning club more fun for me when we get to kind of experience it together. I know this framework works because I've done it before. Like me, Dusty, the scattered ADHD, insomnia prone mama of three with big goals that tend to weigh heavy on my mind. If it can work for me, and I was in a period of time where I was able to wake up at 4:30, which I'm not saying you need to do, but for that season of life, it's exactly what I needed, and it was such a beautiful time. I was able to wake up at 4.30 for almost a year every morning. I got to read my Bible, I got some work in, and it was a really special and precious time for me. But I didn't start by waking up right at 4.30. I started with a lot of other steps that set me up for success to be able to reach that big, beautiful goal that served me really well for a very long season. Anyways, enough about that. Sign up to the Early Morning Club at dustyhaggy.comslash morning. Obviously, a link in your show notes. And thanks for hanging out with me. This was so much fun. Let's talk soon, okay? Bye.