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Morning Routines of Successful Women

I give workshops on leadership including a Women in Leadership Course at the Wharton School of Business and I recommend a few morning rituals to help you be successful and to balance your life
Here are six morning rituals of a successful person.

1.      Post a positive photograph on your mirror and on your computer home page and phone  that makes you happy and inspires you to your greatest goals.  It can be a photo of you playing with your children to inspire you to have work/life balance, a photo of an audience applauding when you are working on a speech, a mock up book cover of the book you are working on to inspire you to write.


2.     Another morning ritual to help you be successful is to clear your mind of clutter. When you first wake up in the morning, take five minutes to write down anything that is muddying up your head. Write in a stream of consciousness any thoughts or feelings that are clogging your brain. This is not a journal or a "to do" list. It's junk. Dump thoughts out on the page the way you dump out the trash. Now your mind is clear and you can accomplish much more in your day. Julia Cameron calls the pages, morning pages and describes the benefits in her book, “The Artists Way.”

3.      Brush and learn. Buy an automatic toothbrush with a timer (most are two minutes) and while you are brushing your teeth, read poetry, motivating quotes and affirmations and other positive messages that you've taped to the bathroom mirror

4.      Ask yourself in the morning - Are you doing what is most important or are you doing what is easy or urgent? To make sure follow these steps: Set a timer on your phone to go off every hour. When it goes off, ask yourself, "Am I doing what is most important?", "Am I doing something that is making me a better person?", "Am I doing something that is making money or is furthering my career?" Do this every day for a week and you will see a pattern of what you are spending most of your time on.


5.      Read your e-mails in priority order. Our tendency is to read and respond to our e-mails from most recently sent down. You may waste time on something that is not urgent. Get into the habit of quickly scanning all your new e-mails for anything that may be urgent and important and respond to those first. Let others know that it helps to be clear about urgency and importance in the subject line of the e-mails they send you.

6.      You can do anything for fifteen minutes.  If you are procrastinating on a task set a timer/alarm on your phone for fifteen minutes. Do the task until the buzzer sounds. Typically starting an unpleasant or difficult task is the hardest part of the task. Once you start something, the momentum can keep you going. If it doesn't get you going, set the timer again tomorrow. So if you need to exercise, meditate, clean, work on a writing project, play with your kids, set an alarm and do it.


Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Positive Emotions Counter the Own-Race Bias

Do you have less racial bias when you are in a good mood? Are you more racially biased when you are in a bad mood? How do your emotions effect your prejudice?

There is a phenomenon called the 'own-race bias' in facial recognition. We find it easier to recognize the faces of people belonging to our own race than we do people belonging to others. This is the technical term for the "they all look the same to me" experience. But studies have shown that people in positive moods are less susceptible to the own-race bias, relative to neutral or negative moods.

In the research on positive emotions we find that positive emotions broaden your perceptions/thoughts/behaviors, while negative ones narrow them. The idea is that deep in our evolutionary past, our ancestors faced very specific threats, and our bodies have evolved to attend to these threats in specific ways, to the exclusion of other things in the environment.

For example, if there's a dangerous predator nearby, you don't want to be caught admiring the pretty daisies. So your whole body shifts perceptions and resources to prepare you to run or fight. But when things are going well, when there's no particular threat, it's better to broaden your perceptions and the potential thoughts and actions you can take, so that you can expand, build resources and make new allies.

Hence, positive emotions counter the physiological effects of negative ones, allow more divergent thinking, and help you to processes faces more globally, rather than focusing on particular features, as negative emotions would tend to lead you to do.

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Martin Short - A Man of Great Energy! - The Body Language King!



This morning I watched an Interview with Martin Short on the Today Show. I just love how he is the man of a thousand looks!
What great energy verve. He is the body language king. I wish I could fly up to New York to see Martin Short in It’s Only a Play and then go see Helen Mirren in The Audience.
Goodness look at his face. I remember when Martin had a morning talk show. He was hysterical and also a great listener which made him a wonderful interviewer.
Perhaps some of that is his innate kindness and perhaps all those years of Improv training that require you to be in the moment and listen helped him.



Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Patti's Latest Novel Suggestion - Kate Atkinson's Human Croquet (1997)



Last night I started a novel by Kate Atkinson called Human Croquet (1997).  It’s not an easy novel, but goodness it is good. There is one passage where a character who was adopted as a baby by an older couple is discussed that says, they were an old couple who only knew about gin and canasta so they taught him both. She describes the character’s little quirks of body language so very well. If you have not read her work start with behind the Scenes at the Museum and go from there.
Her novels are wonderful, but often very slow hard reads. The detective novels are the Jackson Brodie novels.

Novels
Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995) – winner of the 1995 Whitbread Prize
Novels Featuring Jackson Brodie (former police inspector, now private investigator):
Television adaptations
The four Jackson Brodie novels have been adapted by other writers for the BBC under the series titled Case Histories, featuring Jason Isaacs as Brodie.




Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Body Language of World Leaders, Spys and Terrorists

Below is a great article on the body language of world leaders, spys  and terrorists called the body language of James Bond. They quoted three people in the my field that I respect, I just wish they had quoted me!

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.