333: My Hour-by-Hour Miracle Morning & Daily Schedule

[INTRODUCTION]

Hal Elrod: Goal achievers, members of the Miracle Morning Community, friends, family, fellow human beings, hey, it's Hal Elrod. Welcome to the podcast. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. I love you. I appreciate you. Thank you for being here. Today, we're going to talk about I'm going to break down my daily and my weekly schedule. I receive, I don't know the exact number, probably 200 to 300 emails a week from readers and listeners to the podcast and I get a lot of questions. And one of the types of questions that I get a lot is around my schedule. So, it's usually often on the Miracle Morning, “You know what, what's the Miracle Morning? Do you have to do it at this time? Do you have to do it in this order? What's your current Miracle Morning? Has it changed? Has it evolved?” Too often they're around the Miracle Morning structure but often their question is just about how do I structure my day, how do I structure my day in general or so that the Miracle Morning can be possible.

Well, today I figured I'd walk you through my entire day from when I wake up until when I go to bed, as well as how I structure my week. So, I'll go through my entire Miracle Morning, break down each of the SAVERS. I’ll include what I eat, when I eat, how I structured my workday, my family time, you name it. I'll go into everything today. And I've been prepping for this. At first, I thought this will be like a five-minute podcast. I'm just going to go through my schedule and then as I started going in deeper, I go, “Well, no, I'll break down my SAVERS and what I'm doing for those. I'll break down the smoothie I'm making right now and why and what's in it.” And so, I'm going to give you guys as much as I possibly can today. I will warn you, my schedule it's pretty boring in how consistent it is. It's extremely consistent. I think some people would call that OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I call it consistent or disciplined or whatever words make me feel good about myself.

[EPISODE]

Hal Elrod: So, here we go. Without further ado, first and foremost, my morning ritual, which I'll start with that. I want to let you know this is the same seven days a week. So, the morning ritual I'm about to share with you, it is the same seven days a week and it only differs if I happen to stay up late to visit with friends. The other night I had friends over playing board games until 11 PM. So, normally I go to bed by about 9 or 10 so that threw my morning schedule off a little bit, but it's the only time it's different, which it probably averages one night a week where I stay up later. So, it's usually taking the wife out on a date, hanging out with my kids for a movie, something like that, but otherwise, this is my ritual. I call it my foundational schedule and it's consistent seven days a week, except for if there's other relationships that throw it off, that I value the relationship so I value the time that they want to stay up late with me. It would never be my choice. If I’m hanging out with my friends, they'd be coming over my house at like 5 AM to hang out. But unfortunately, not everyone's on the same schedule that I am.

So, here we go. So, the first thing is waking up with no alarm clock. And this is big. When I had cancer, I looked at everything in my life, I kind of deconstructed everything in my life, inquired on everything in my life and went, "What may have caused the cancer?” And there was workout supplements that I had taken in the past. There were prescription drugs I'd taken in the past, and I looked at what's anything that's not natural. And one of the things is I was sleeping an average of five to six hours a night for years. And as you'll see in the Miracle Morning documentary that's coming out later this year, the sleep doctor as he's known, Dr. Michael Breus, there's a powerful line in there where he says, “We now know that the more sleep-deprived you are, the faster cancer cells multiply,” and boy do I wish I would have seen that before the cancer. I think that was after before I saw that scene.

But yeah, so for me, sleep now is crucial. And so, I stopped setting an alarm and I now try to get seven to eight hours of sleep but I let my body wake up naturally, which is a big difference where forcing myself awake, which most of us do with an alarm clock. Now you might think, "Well, I have to use an alarm clock because I have to get up at a certain time,” I'd encourage you to try a few different things. First, on the weekends, you can use the weekends as an experiment, where you set your intention before bed, tell yourself, "Body, we're waking up tomorrow at _____ AM,” whatever that is for you, 6 AM, 5 AM, 7 AM, whatever it is on the weekend for you, and test yourself. And here's what's amazing. I had a friend tell me when I was 20 years old, "My mentor taught me how he didn't use an alarm clock and he just programmed himself before bed what time he wanted to wake up,” and I was like, “That's crazy. How does that work?”

But when I was 20 years old, I started doing that and I don't remember how long I did that for, maybe before my car accident, but I did that and consistently worked almost every day, I'd wake up virtually within a few minutes of when I told myself I was going to wake up and then for whatever reason I got away from it for like 20 years. And then I finally just got back to it, I don't know, probably six months or so ago. So, waking up without an alarm clock is how I start the day. And by the way, I tell myself I want to wake up by 5 AM, and almost every single morning, I wake up at 5:04, 4:55. It's usually within like five minutes on either side. And I've been doing that now for, again, going on a year and it works like clockwork every single morning. So, waking up with no alarm clock first and foremost, and it's usually around 5 AM, brush my teeth and I drink a full glass of water.

So, rehydrating obviously in the Miracle Morning I talked about how important it is because if you sleep six, seven, eight hours a night unless you're waking up taking drinks of water which is not ideal because it's interrupting your REM sleep and your deep sleep if you are allowing yourself to wake up and drink water and I used to do that when I was younger, but now I've trained myself no water. I stopped drinking water about two hours before bed. So, I don't get woken up out of REM or out of my deep sleep to have to go pee. So, I stopped drinking water. I've kind of timed when I have to stop drinking water so that I don't wake up. And so, I almost never wake up to go pee unless occasionally, but rarely ever. And when I wake up in the morning, you're essentially dehydrated because you haven't had water in six, seven, eight hours if not more. So, that's the first thing you do is drink a bunch of water.

Then I go into my kitchen. And the next thing I do is what I call a sodium bicarbonate lemon shot. Sodium bicarbonate lemon shots. Sodium bicarbonate, by the way, I believe is just the technical term for baking soda. I use a baking soda or sodium bicarbonate aka baking soda. That is the brand is Pure Organic Ingredients. I get it on Amazon. It's obviously food grade. Maybe all baking soda are food-grade, I don't know, but this is one of the highest quality from what I can tell. And then what I do is I take half a teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate and I'll tell you why I do this in a second, first thing, and then fresh squeezed lemon water and I put the sodium bicarbonate in a little like almost like a shot glasses, a little bit bigger, and a mini mason jar. And then I pour in the lemon juice and I drink it really quickly because it starts to fizz like crazy. So, I try to drink as much as I can and drink most of it so it doesn't over fizz and then I pour in the rest of lemon juice, shake it up, and I drink the rest.

The reason for that is this, if you've studied at all alkalinity and the body's alkalinity, when I got cancer and I was searching for natural cures, one of the natural cures if you will is getting your body into a state of alkalinity. And the science has shown or the theory is I guess you could say that when a body is acidic, it is susceptible to disease and things like cancer. When it's an alkaline state then cancer cannot thrive in an alkaline environment. They’ve done that in a lab. They'll create an alkaline environment and lemon juice by the way is one of the most alkalizing things you can put in your body as is the sodium bicarbonate so the idea is to immediately put your body in a state of alkalinity. Now, if you wonder, well, how do you know if that's even working, you can for like $6 or $8 on Amazon you can get alkalinity testing strips and you can pee on it first thing in the morning, check your alkalinity, and you immediately do that sodium bicarbonate shot, 30 minutes later test your alkalinity again, and you will see that your body has moved into a much more alkaline environment.

So, I start my day and I end my day with a sodium bicarbonate shot. The next thing that I do is I make green tea and I actually started using an instant green tea which you might go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Hal, that doesn't sound very healthy. Instant green tea?” From what I can tell from this company and the way that they make their tea is they actually take real organic tea leaves, they grind them into a fine powder, and then all you do is add hot water. So, it's not like a synthetic or a chemical or low-grade tea or tea substitute. It’s actual organic tea leaves and the brand, which by the way, I'm not an affiliate for any of these, and I wish I was because I'm telling you about all the stuff that I use but it's Pique Teas. So, P-I-Q-U-E, Pique Teas on Amazon, and I use a jasmine green tea first thing in the morning. And then usually after lunch, I use a sencha green tea and that's because I like a little bit of caffeine. There's a lot of benefits for caffeine but in moderation is ideal. And the benefit of using green tea versus coffee is that green tea also contains L-Theanine. And then there's one other substance that I'm forgetting, but that helps counterbalance the effects of the caffeine so that you don't have the crash.

Green tea has also shown to be a cancer fighter or a cancer healer if you will. So, I start the day with that green tea, gives me that caffeine. Now, by the way, let me explain one thing. I do the sodium bicarbonate shot which I recommend for like everybody by the way. This is if you want to prevent cancer, keep yourself healthy. In fact, everything I'm going to share today is what I do to keep from ever getting cancer again. So, I encourage you. You can consider if some of these you want to try them out or they work for you if you want to eat as healthy as, well, as I think is healthy, right? I don't claim that I know everything but I do claim that I have read a lot of books on all types of diets from eating keto, which is typically high fat, often a high meat diet and the benefits of that to a vegan plant-based diet to a raw vegan diet and kind of to a Paleo Diet like I've looked into all of them. And so, everything I share is typically from me reading and researching a lot of different resources and trying to piece together what makes sense.

So, here's what I want to say. The sodium bicarbonate shot which I encourage everybody to do, I drink that and then you don't want to immediately drink something different because it'll mix with the sodium bicarbonate lemon juice and you're kind of counteracting the effects potentially. So, that green tea I make that and then I go do something called the BEMER mat, and I'll explain what that is in a second. I do the BEMER mat for eight minutes and during those eight minutes that's allowing my body to get into that alkaline state. Now, in full confessional, I’ll always be transparent, I have not actually researched and when I say research, I mean Google, I haven’t actually googled how long before I should drink my next beverage. So, as I'm saying this, I'm realizing I should actually do that. So, I just made up in my mind, probably not good to drink the green tea right after I drink the sodium bicarbonate shot. So, what I do is I drink the sodium bicarbonate shot and then I go lay on the BEMER mat for eight minutes, and that gives me eight minutes then I come back in and I start drinking the green tea but I figured that's enough time for my body to process the lemon juice. But again, I got to google that and see if I should be waiting longer.

The BEMER mat if you want to google that, it's B-E-M-E-R. The BEMER mat it is not inexpensive. I think it's like $5,000. I bought it when I had cancer. There's a ton of peer-reviewed research medical study. There's all sorts of studies on this mat and it uses an electrical microcurrent that helps to stimulate your cells. And again, I haven't read this in a while. I don't remember exactly how to explain it. I don't sell it but there are a lot of people that swear by it and so I decided based on all the research that I read when I bought it three years ago that it was a good idea. And again, it's not just for people that have cancer. It's for anybody and everybody. In fact, with all the EMF exposure that we have, electromagnetic frequency exposure, I watched an interesting video the other day from Carla Gilmore, who is a naturopathic doctor that works with a lot of cancer patients. I visited her in Florida when I was diagnosed and she explained how the BEMER mat helps your body to reset, after all of the EMF exposure that we take in all day from all of our electronics, devices, Wi-Fi, all of those things.

And by the way, the BEMER mat is eight minutes in the morning and then eight minutes at night before bed, so I use it twice. So, it kind of like sets your body up right in the morning and then it kind of helps reset you in the evening. I also use, the next thing I do is I put on a laser watch. I won't even explain this. In fact, I don't even know the name of it, regenerator I think. It's from Germany of my dad's friend who had cancer said he used this. It helps clean your blood as it flows through your wrist. It has like six or four different lasers that shoot into your wrist. And so, I wear that every day. It's one of those things where I'm like I don't know if it's helping but I don't think it's hurting and maybe it's helping. So, if you've ever had a disease, you tend to, well at least for me, I throw everything but the kitchen sink at it in terms of as healthy as I can options. I go, "Well, if this doesn't hurt but it might help, I'll try it,” and I stack that as much as I possibly could. The next thing that I do is I take a variety of supplements but actually, they're very minimal now. When I had cancer, I was taking like 60 supplements, all different kinds of I don't even know, you name it, everything that was supposedly might fight cancer, I took it.

Now, I take a company called it's Dr. Schulze, not the foot guy but if you go to his website is HerbDoc.com. Everything he makes is plant-based or food-based. It is not synthetic. So, for example, vitamin C, I don't know if you're aware of this, but vitamin C, I believe most of it is made in China. I read that at some point. So, don't quote me on that. Most of it's made in China but you can definitely verify this by looking at back of any bottle, which is that it's made of ascorbic acid and ascorbic acid is not natural. That's made in the lab. So, any vitamins that I take, I try to take nothing that is synthetic and man-made in the lab, but everything that is made in nature. So, the vitamin C I take for example is made with acerola cherry and the camu camu like all these different fruits and vegetables and herbs that are high in vitamin C. And so, the HerbDoc.com, Dr. Schulze, I take is superfood, which is I take the capsule form and to give an example, you typically know that it's food-based because when it's synthetic, they can really concentrate it so they can post on the bottle that it's really high doses of this vitamin or that.

When it's food-based, they usually have to use a lot. So, instead of taking one vitamin in the morning like what's that popular brand like Centrum One A Day, instead of that, it's 15 little food capsules that I take each morning. So, you take a lot because you're getting as much vitamins as you need but it's not concentrated synthetic compounds. It's actually from nature and most of his herbs they're either organic or they are wild harvested and it says on the bottle which is which. And I use a lot of his products or not as many anymore. I've used most of them but again, I've really paired down. I'm cutting down on my supplements just because I've taken so many for so long, I just made a decision recently. I was talking to one of my health advisors, and he said, “Hal, why don't you stop taking supplements completely. Let your body just detox from everything.” And so, in order to do that, I'm just kind of going through everything in my cupboard right now. Once it's all gone, I'm going to just take a month of nothing and then I'll start buying stuff back.

Another brand by the way on Amazon, you can get pure synergy. That's another organic food-based supplement. But most vitamins out there, the large majority are none of them were regulated, first of all, and most of these companies, they're just trying to make a buck and they're using synthetic ingredients that may or may not be harmful. It may not be cut with other things. So, I really encourage if you're taking supplements or vitamins, to make sure that you're doing your research and you're trying to buy from companies like mega foods is a good one. They use whole food supplements. It's all derived from food, not from synthetic. So, MegaFood is a great brand. Pure synergy is a great brand. And then Dr. Schulze, which actually, he's on Amazon, too. Actually, not all of his products, HerbDoc.com, but he has like tonics for when you're sick and all these other things, so highly recommend that.

What do I do next? So, then I do my SAVERS and my SAVERS usually start at 5:30 because unless I get up at 4:30. Some mornings I wake up a little early, jump out of bed, get that extra time. But if I wake up around 5:00, takes about a half-an-hour to do this morning routine of the BEMER mat, making tea, taking my supplements, sodium bicarbonate shot, all these things. Then usually on 5:20, 5:25, 5:30, I start my SAVERS. There’s three areas that I focus on in the morning. I do me personally. So, 30 minutes of my SAVERS are for me, 30 minutes of my SAVERS are for my family, and 30 minutes of my SAVERS are for my mission, which you could also say is for my business They kind of go hand-in-hand, my business, impacting people through my books, and podcasts and all those things. That, for me, it's my mission, and it just happens to be what I do for a living as well. But I try to keep it mission first and that for me, feels very pure and it feels like I'm doing it for the right reasons not to make money. And when I was younger, it was I want to make money and help people and now it's like I want to help people. And as long as I'm focused on serving others, I feel like the money kind of will come but at the same time, I do read books on how to do that because for me it doesn't come natural, necessarily.

Here we go. So, I'm going to run through the SAVERS for you guys and gals and give you kind of what my SAVERS look like today. Well, they're about 90 minutes long. I just mentioned that. And first, we'll go to the SAVERS in order. I start with silence and I vary the types of meditation that I do, typically between one of three and it just kind of depends on my mood, my day. If I'm bored of a meditation, I'll try something new. And the three kinds that I typically do are, number one, mindfulness meditation, and mindfulness meditation is essentially just being fully present in the moment using all of my senses, and allowing thoughts to come into my mind, just being at peace with them and allowing them to leave, and just continuing to try to be just really striving to be present. And again, using all my senses, like this morning, or it gets us through most mornings, I am silent, and I'll hear the buzzing of the air conditioning or the heater, or I'll hear the birds chirping outside or I’ll hear just my house, houses make weird noises, or I'll just listen to the silence or I'll listen to my breath. I try to be fully present to that moment.

In fact, if you didn't listen, I encourage you last week's podcast was how to access the power of presence. And I talked about this, that meditation is kind of training to teach you, to train you to how to be present so you can apply it not just in the morning when you meditate but all day long, like so you can live your life being fully present so that things are no longer a means to an end. I talked about on the podcast last week that when we're doing dishes, it's usually we're trying to get done with the dishes to do the next thing. In fact, that's how we live most of our lives in the future, getting done with this thing to do the next thing and then the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. We're never fully present to our life because we're always focused on the next thing, whereas the opposite of that being mindful is we were doing the dishes, you're fully present. You don't wish you were doing the next thing.

You're like, this is the best thing I could be doing because it's what I'm doing right now, just a conscious decision to be fully present. And you're present to the temperature of the water on your hands and the smell of the soap and maybe the slipperiness of the soap as you wash the dishes and then the clinking of the dishes in the dishwasher or the strainer. You're just fully present when you're making coffee, you're fully present to the grinding of the beans and the sound and the smell, and the texture and the taste and the pour, everything. And think about that. That's how you get the most out of life in my opinion. Most of us we go through life and we get to our day like and we never were fully present. We weren't fully living. We were always living in the future, thinking that salvation would come at some future date when we achieve some future goal or improved some circumstance that we don't quite like right now. But the reality is that when you get to the future, all it is, is the present moment that you never trained yourself on how to fully interact with and engage with and embrace and experience fully.

So, that to me is what mindfulness meditation is about. It's about experiencing that and training yourself so that you can experience it all the time. But I love my meditation. I love the mindfulness meditation because it's like one of my mantra. So, I'm going to go have a mantra when I do the meditation, not intentionally, usually. It's just kind of in my subconscious, but it's like, “This moment is perfect. This moment is perfect.” And then I'll just like feel the truth of that and again, allow all of my senses to take in the moment. I use my peripheral vision to see everything while I'm hearing everything, while I'm feeling everything, all of the senses at once and usually tasting or smelling but I'm not eating anything or smelling much. So, that's mindfulness meditation. I'll sometimes do loving-kindness meditation. In full transparency, I don't do this as often. It's also called loving-kindness meditation. It’s also called Metta meditation, which is it's basically the practice of directing kind, loving thoughts, and emotions, and energy toward yourself and/or towards others.

And the standard loving-kindness meditation is taking a few deep breaths and then essentially, you're just repeating the words, I'm trying to remember the exact wording if I could google it real fast. I don't know where it is, but it's something along the side. Well, that's the thing. I don't do it. I'm going to tell you how I do it. I don't do it according to the words. There's an actual like phrasing you're supposed to use. I just think positive thoughts like I'll imagine my wife and I'll just think I love you. I love you. I'm so grateful for you. You're such an amazing wife. You're such an amazing mom. And the idea is that you're choosing the thoughts that will best serve you and the other people that you're directing it toward. So, in life, our brain tends to find problems and that includes with other people. So, we might be irritated with another person or think about the things they did that upset us or so on and so forth. And the loving-kindness meditation for me there's theories that, of course, that the energy goes out into the world and actually touches that person and impacts them.

Whether that's true, I don't know. I don't have any data on that but I do know that it affects how I feel about the people in my world in my life, including people that I completely disagree with. Like, I'll do the loving-kindness meditation to myself in a state of love and forgiveness toward those that may have wronged me or wronged my family, or whatever the wrong in the world. So, the last is loving-kindness meditation and then the other is a guided meditation. Again, I usually do the mindfulness meditation, but sometimes I'll do the loving-kindness or guided which I'll use an app like Calm or Headspace or Simple Habit. Actually, Simple Habit’s one my favorite, believe it or not. And I'll just listen to a guided meditation. The other one is Oura Ring. I have an Oura Ring. If you don't know what that is, you can google it, O-U-R-A, Oura Ring, or it's probably like OuraRing.com. But essentially, well, not essentially. That's the wrong word to use for what I was about to say. That was a filler word it feels like. What am I talking about? But they have on the Oura Ring, there's a little I'm on the app right now on the phone, there's a little plus button, you hit the plus button and then there's take a moment and it will allow you to do a deep breathing exercise or a meditation, a guided meditation. And so, a guided meditation, of course, is just someone guiding you through it.

And if you're not proficient in meditation, I encourage you to try all of them. But just know with the mindfulness meditation, it's not about clearing your thoughts. It's about being completely present and at peace with everything, including your thoughts. That's one of the biggest misconceptions is I used to get frustrated thinking, “Oh, I'm supposed to have a clear mind so I can meditate but my mind’s always racing.” And so, just be clear, mindfulness meditation is about being at peace. In fact, having thoughts is actually great because you're learning to work with the thoughts as Giuliana Ray, one of my mentors and founder of Unified Mindfulness teaches. In fact, she's in the Miracle Morning Movie and actually, she says that. All right. So, that's my silence. It's typically mindfulness meditation, sometimes the loving-kindness meditation, sometimes the guided meditation.

Number two, affirmations. I have affirmations for each important area of my life, my mission, my health, my marriage, as a parent. I have affirmations for almost every single area of my life, if not all of them, that are important to me. And there are different ways that I do affirmations. Really quickly I'm going to review the way that I teach affirmations and I don't know that I actually, I don't think I wrote this in the Miracle Morning book because I think I came up with this as I learned and grew and evolved later on after I wrote the book. I'll be sure to include it in the next version though, which we are updating right now, by the way, a little bonus tip for you guys or bonus news. We are updating the Miracle Morning book in time for the Miracle Morning Movie release so that the book is improved. I'm improving the writing right now. But affirmations, the way that I teach them now in case you haven't heard this or if you have, here's a refresher.

The problem with affirmations, the way they've been taught for I don't know how long, decades or centuries is either we're taught to lie to ourselves like say. “I am _____,” and it's something you aspire to be, but that you may not yet be. And the problem with lying yourself by saying something that is not yet true for you or that you don't believe is true for you, is the truth will always prevail and you'll feel inauthentic. You'll go, “I am thin,” but if you're overweight and you say, “I am thin,” that's not yet true. So, you're constantly fighting with yourself. Your subconscious is going to go, "Dude, no, you're lying. That's not true.” So, the truth will always prevail. So, lying to yourself is never the optimum strategy. The second problem with affirmations is we are taught to phrase affirmations in a way that promises some magical solution in our lives.

The example I like to give is when it comes to money, there's this affirmation that says, “I am a Money Magnet. Money flows to me effortlessly and in abundance.” Now, why would someone like to recite that affirmation? Well, if you're struggling financially, and you're like, “Oh, my gosh, I'm so stressed about money,” but then you just go into this fantasy world with your affirmation that says, "It's okay because I'm a money magnet, and money is going to flow to me effortlessly, and in abundance.” Well, in that moment, it might give you a sense of relief, like, "Oh, I hope so. God, that would be amazing. I really need that money to start flowing into my life.” Now, I don't want to discount that. I'm not going to say that does or doesn't work but, in my experience, money doesn't quite work that way. Usually, you have to add value to the world in some way, either to your employer or to your customers or clients. You have to create value in some way that they are willing to compensate you for. That's typically how you attract or money flows to you is not effortlessly but it takes some effort.

Now, you can get to a point where you do some initial effort and then it starts flowing effortlessly into your life like I've talked before as an author or if you're a real estate investor, and you buy a property, and then you get rental income month after month after month after month and that property is managed by a property management company, you can pretty much sit back while money does flow into your life, but it wasn't effortlessly. It took effort to get that setup. Same thing, writing a book. When you write a book, well, now people are buying the book every month like Miracle Morning, I don't know the exact number, roughly 10,000 people a month. Maybe it's less. No, no, it's actually more than that, anyway, 10,000 a month buy Miracle Morning but I still put out effort. I've done 444 podcast interviews since the book came out and three years with cancer, I didn't do any. So, there was effort. Anyway, I'm going too deep in the weeds. The point is that I want affirmations that produce results for me, like I don't want to just feel good and I don't want to delude myself. I want to see improvements in the areas that I'm affirming.

So, I'm going to give you guys three steps to create affirmations to craft them in a way that will do that for you. Number one, affirm what you're committed to. So, don't say, “I am thin,” if you're not yet thin. Don't say, “I am wealthy,” if you're not yet wealthy. Don't say, “I am happy,” if you're miserable. Say, “I am committed to losing weight or being thin. I am committed to earning income and becoming wealthy. I am committed to being the happiest I could possibly be.” “I am committed to” sends a very different message to your subconscious than “I am already _____.” “I am committed to _____” is different and more effective. You're literally programming your subconscious with exactly what any person needs to achieve meaningful results as you need a commitment. You need commitment to your health, to your wealth, to your marriage, to your happiness, whatever the area may be.

Number two, why is that commitment crucial for you? Or another way I've said in the past, why is it deeply meaningful to you? But I've evolved. Now for me, it's why is this crucial? Because why and which it tells you why it is so important, so meaningful that you're going to do whatever it takes, because it is absolutely crucial. So, number one, what are you committed to? Number two, why is it absolutely crucial for you to achieve that commitment or at least something in the range of that commitment? And then number three, what specific actions will you take and when? What specific actions will you take and when? So, number one, you're reinforcing what you're committed to. Number two, you're creating an emotional attachment or I should say, engagement, because I'm not a big fan of emotional attachment. You should be emotionally detached from your results and emotionally engaged with those results. So, you can be engaged, but if they don't come to pass, don't be attached. Be at peace. So, that's another topic for another episode that we've probably covered in the past.

But number one, you're reinforcing the commitment. Number two, you're creating emotional engagement for that, because you're reminding yourself why it is absolutely crucial. And number three, you're clarifying which actions need to be taken and when. And that three-part combination for an affirmation is programming your subconscious mind with what it needs in terms of the commitment and the emotional engagement to achieve the outcome. And then you're directing your conscious behavior by clarifying the actions and the time and the date and the frequency that you're going to take those actions. So, that is my favorite affirmation formula. And I want to say this, I also create affirmations all the time, that have nothing to do with that formula. That formula though is how I start the year with my goals is I go through all of my goals and I affirm that those three steps for each one, but then I will literally read a quote in a book and I'll be like, “Ooh, that's something I need to engage with daily. That needs to become part of my way of thinking. And in doing so, I affirm it and I remember it and I remind myself day in and day out over and over and over again.”

So, an affirmation in its simplest form is a reminder. It's reminding you of something that's important. And the more you keep anything top of mind, the more likely you are to actually act on that thought, on that reminder. The other benefit of affirmation is that you're choosing the thoughts or the reminders that best serve you so you're constantly upgrading and programming your subconscious mind to think, feel, and live in alignment with your affirmations. So, there you go. The V is for visualization. You know that. How do I do my visualization? A couple of things. Number one is I will visualize, I’ll look over my goals and I'll visualize each outcome coming true. But I only do that for about 30 seconds, maybe 60 seconds, not very long. Why do I do that? The benefit of that which, by the way, is usually the only part of visualization that we're taught is to visualize the dream coming true, the goal being achieved, make a vision board, put it up on the wall, stare at it. We're usually taught to only visualize the end result.

I believe it's the least important part of visualization, which we'll get to why that is in a second, but there are benefits. Now, what are the benefits? Visualizing the ideal outcome starts to create a belief that it's possible because once you see it over and over and over, you start to imagine it, believe it. It feels real to you. That's a benefit. Another benefit is you do foster that emotional engagement when you see yourself crossing the finish line, cashing the check, walking across the aisle, whatever, getting married sort of I’m trying to say, whatever the outcome is, when you see it, you get excited about it and then you're fired up. Now, you're fueling the flames of motivation, of drive, and you want to do whatever is necessary to make that a reality. That's the benefit of visualizing your ideal outcome. However, it's only half the equation, so to speak. The second part and I believe it's most important is visualize your ideal day. And what I mean is visualize yourself engaged in the activity that will produce that outcome, because it's only the activity that really matters because without the activity, the outcome won't come to pass.

But if you don't visualize the outcome and you only visualize the activity, well, that's going to produce an outcome. So, I’ll give you an example. When I was training for an ultra-marathon, I did not like running. I hated running. I don't use the word hate very often. I don't like that word, but I really despise running and I still kind of do. In fact, I do. I tried running again, I didn't like it so I started bike riding, but this was as of 12 months ago. But the point being when I was training for the ultra-marathon, I would visualize crossing the finish line for about 30 seconds, maybe a minute, get myself excited, imagine and I smiled, like that's going to be amazing when that happens. But if that's all I did, it would have been counterproductive because I would have tricked myself into believing that I was going to cross the finish line but missing a very important component, which was training.

And so, I then visualize myself looking at my phone when the alarm went off at 7 AM, which was my running time. I visualized myself going into my bedroom, getting dressed, and my running clothes, heading out the front door with a smile on my face, I created the emotional experience of what it would be like to be excited to go on that run. And that's the point of visualization is you're rehearsing the ideal emotional experience for your ideal day. I'm going to say that again. You're rehearsing your ideal emotional experience in order to create your ideal day. And so, what happened is when the alarm went off at 7 AM, running an activity that I didn't like or despised, I actually got up automatically. I'd already rehearsed this, I already went there in my mind, body, and my emotions. So, I got up, went to my living room, got dressed, headed out the front door, smiled, felt excited, went on a run, and it happened like clockwork. That is, in my opinion, in my experience, the most effective way to use visualization.

The E is for exercise. My exercise in the morning is a bike ride and I usually go around 6:30 AM, sometimes closer to 7, but I wake my kids up at 7. Unless they want to go right away, I'll go on my own. But anyway, the point is I go on a bike ride around my neighborhood and as soon as I’m out the front door, I smile. I look at the trees. I look at the sun peeking through the trees and I get present. I go, "This moment is perfect.” All the craziness in the world in my life, in our lives, all the chaos, all the uncertainty when you're present the moment is almost always perfect. And when I'm in nature I'm reminded, the other affirmation I'll say is I'll go, "This moment is perfect,” and I'll look at the trees. My neighbors got a lot of trees and grass. It's not as, you know, I mean, I guess it's part of manmade nature with the grass but the trees are all been here for hundreds of years. I’ll look at the trees and I'll go, "This is life. This is life.”

And let me get on a quick side soapbox tangent here. I was talking to my friend, John Ruhlin, earlier today. I've had him on the podcast, author of Giftology, and I was talking to John and I said, “You know, when I'm in nature, I remember humans, animals, and earth. That's pretty much all that's real.” Like that's the essence of life and everything else, the society that we've created, this man-made society where very few of us value the things that really matter. I don't want to say that we don't value. We value humans, of course, but typically like our society, it's very materialistic. It's very much work hard so you can buy things and then buy better things and then buy bigger and better things like that's what it's about, consume, consume, consume. And so, for me and my family, we're really having a lot of conversations lately, and my friends too. We're actually looking at buying some land and going, “Hey, let's get back in touch with what actually matters and it's each other. It's living. It’s life. It's living things, including earth.” So, there's my soapbox.

When I go on my bike ride, I am so present to the air and the sunshine and the nature and the sound of the birds. And so, it's a really meditative experience that wouldn't happen quite the same if I was riding an exercise bike indoors or working out in my, you know, I’ve got a little workout room in my house but being out in nature is such a beautiful experience. I go for a bike. Well, it's only 10 minutes by the way. It's a 10-minute bike ride. I've got it down to a science. I go up a hill and up a few steep cul de sacs and get a good leg workout and then ride down the hill and just cruise all the way home. Come in the door. The next thing that I do is I wake my kids up for quality time. And so, usually, 7 AM I wake the kids up. Now, this isn't every day because like I kind of test how light they're sleeping. And if they're really in a deep sleep, I don't interrupt it because I just believe that we should wake up as naturally as possible. So, I'll usually walk in kind of like put my face in front of theirs just kind of like just whisper or something.

I don't want to wake them up but if they're lightly sleeping, they'll wake up really easily and then they jump right out of bed. It's amazing, by the way, when you do this how you see the impact, the difference between when I've tried to wake them up against their will, and they're like, “Ugh.” They were sleeping deeply, like the body's not made to wake up like that. And then the difference of when I walked in and my son just pops up like his body was ready to wake up. So, just bringing that back when what I talked about not setting an alarm, letting your body wake up when it's the right time. I just realized I didn't finish the rest of my SAVERS. Let me back up. And that's because I don't do exercise in that order. I do exercise last. So, after visualization, I will do typically my journaling. It varies sometimes. I do my journaling first thing in the morning if I woke up with some inspired thoughts or some negative stressful thoughts, I'll use freewriting as my scribing where I will just start writing what's on my mind. And sometimes it's while I woke up at 4:55 AM feeling really happy about this and about that and grateful for this and that. So, I want to capture those that feeling and deepen it and be able to revisit it later. Or sometimes I'll wake up and I'll be super stressed over something. And I'll wake up and like those.

I don’t know if I taught this on the podcast before but it was a week or so. I woke up thinking about the Miracle Morning movie and feeling really stressed about all the different moving pieces that we have to do to get this thing ready. It's like it's finally after five-plus years of filming, we are a few months away from releasing it. And, yeah, the date is still tentative so I'm not thinking like, I've kind of announced a date but that's not the date we're going with. I don't think so. I'm going to wait until we have an exact date, which we're close to. But the point is I worked with all this fear and stress and anxiety around the movie and so I immediately open my journal and I wrote down, I should have grabbed my journal. I could have read it to you but I wrote down all of the things I was feeling and thinking and afraid of and then I basically counteracted them and I go, “I’m afraid that what if people don't like the movie?” That was one of my fears and I go, "Well, what's the truth?” I go, "The truth is people already seen early versions of the movie and it's even better now. And when they saw early versions of the movie, when we screened it to get feedback, people loved it.” I go, "It's even better.” So, that's not true.

So, the point is free writing is I’ll journal and I'll just write down basically like a self-therapy session. You write down everything on your mind, positive or negative, and then you work through it. You talk through it and you don't pressure. You just literally set a timer or don't set a timer. Just start writing and you don't try to think of what you're going to write ahead of time. You can if you have some thoughts, but I’ll start writing sometimes going, “I woke up feeling this way and I don't know what I'm going to write about,” but oh, yeah, yeah, what about that one thing? And I'm excited about this. And yesterday, we spent time with our friend. It was great. I'll just write. It's like capturing my life at that moment.

I'm going to hold on to that. Never mind. I’m going to hold on to that. There's something I was going to teach you guys but it will take too long and I'm going to make it an entire podcast episode. All right. I won't leave you hanging. It is the concept of fact versus story. I think Michael Beckwit, I don't know if he originated this. I learned it in the book, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. I guess I'll give you a very quick overview since I started talking about it. The point is that in life there are facts and there are stories. Facts are what actually happen, what someone says, what someone does. Stories are what we make up about the facts. So, a fact, and I wrote this when I did this worksheet in my hand, I have meetings in my schedule. The story I tell myself that I don't want to have meetings in my schedule. And when you separate facts from stories you start to look at, well, it's the stories that cause all of my suffering. Like, for example, someone in your life says something to you that you don't like, and it upsets you. Well, when you actually understand, that's not what upsets you. What upsets you is your thoughts about what they said. It's the story you hear what they said. They said this. They shouldn't say this. Them saying this means blank, blank, blank. It's all the stories that we create, we keep replaying in our heads over and over and over and over again that create all of our suffering.

The other book I'm reading, Loving What Is, right now by Byron Katie, that book goes into this in another way. So, the point is I was that morning when I was writing what I was so afraid of and stressed about with the movie, I drew a line down the middle and I wrote facts on one side and stories on the other. Facts, what if my team and me can't get this ready in time? I’m sorry. That was the story. The fact was we're on schedule. We can move the date which I think we've had to do if it's not right so like it's fine. And all of a sudden when I come look at the fact and the story, I went there's nothing to suffer for. There's nothing to stress about. So, I'm touching on that but I do want to do a full episode on that concept because it has been revolutionary where you literally can free yourself from all of your suffering by learning how to separate facts and stories, and learn how to investigate which thoughts are causing you pain, and learn how to let go of those thoughts. So, again, it's an entire episode worth. We will dive into that at some point.

So, that's my scribing practice. I also use the Five Minute Journal app on my phone, and I write down what I'm grateful for, for the day, and then by the end of the day, I take a picture and I capture something from that day. So, that's my scribing practice. And then I then read and reading is typically, again, three areas of focus: me, my family, and my mission. So, I read a book that is specific to help me something on spirituality or personal development. I read a book that is about my family, such as a parenting book and in a second, I'll tell you which books I'm reading now. I'm reading three books for all three of these topics. And then one is about my mission. It's usually a book on how to reach more people or build a platform or something very business-specific on leadership which right now, the three books I'm reading for me, I'm reading Loving What Is by Byron Katie. For my family, I'm reading Hold On To Your Kids. I can't think of the author's name right now but it's called Hold On To Your Kids, one of the best parenting books I've ever read. And then for my mission, I'm reading the 15 Commitments Of Conscious Leadership. And I will sometimes depending on if I have extra time like the kids don't wake up, I’ll read out of two of the books in a day. A lot of times I'll just alternate the book based on whatever I feel like I need to or want to learn on that day.

How are we doing on time? 47 minutes. All right. We got some more time. Here we go. So, that concludes my Miracle Morning as it is now. And again, in summary, three focuses, me, family, and mission, it's usually about 90 minutes up to two-and-a-half hours. So, it's 5:30 AM to 7:00 AM when I wake the kids up. If my kids don't wake up which is summer right now, so they're staying up later than me sometimes so they're probably waking up two or three days a week and doing a morning routine with me. Otherwise, I’m letting them sleep in. So, if they don't wake up at seven, I will then extend my Miracle Morning for another hour. So, I’ll end up doing a two-and-a-half-hour long Miracle Morning and incorporating those three areas. All right. And then we're going to go through the rest of this a little quicker. 7 AM, waking the kids up unless they don't wake up, I just told you, and then 8 AM is usually family time. So, from 8 AM to 9 AM it's family and breakfast time for me.

So, family and breakfast time I'll usually go and my wife usually is awake by then. I go in and snuggle with her and ask her how she's doing and just do a little quality time with my wife. The kids are usually up by then. I'll go play with the kids, hang out with the kids. And then around 8:30 I make my smoothie. And I make my smoothie at 8:30 because it takes me like 20 minutes because there are so many different things and I'm going to give you a little bit of those right now. I'm actually going to break down my basic smoothie recipe for you. Now, this is very different from the smoothie that I put in the Miracle Morning bonuses for the book because that was eight years ago. I need to update it with this one. But this is using most of the foods and herbs and things that are shown to heal your body of cancer or to prevent cancer. So, these are energizing life-giving cancer-healings - that's what I’m going to call this. It's the energizing life-giving cancer-healing smoothie.

It starts out with one-and-a-half cups of lemon juice. So, we have a lemon juicer and once a week I use 30 lemons a week. Thirty lemons, big organic lemons, we juice them at the end of the week, and then pour them into a bottle like a little bit into each bottle. Like I don't know how much exactly. I think it's two lemons per bottle. And then, oh yeah, because we have 15 bottles, 30 lemans, 15 bottles, so I filled up evenly across all the bottles, they’re glass bottles, and then I fill the rest of it with water and then I put them in the fridge. So, only have to do this once a week. And then every morning I unscrew it, dump the lemon juice in. Now, for many of you, you're probably thinking, “Eww, lemon juice in a smoothie?” That's what I thought too. But remember, lemon juice is one of the most alkalizing substances to put in your body and actually this smoothie tastes amazing. And I've had friends try it and I've said, “Look, tell me your honest opinion. You will not hurt my feelings if you say it's gross. I'm just literally curious if other people think this tastes as good as I do because I'm like addicted to it.”

And I've had probably three friends try it and all of them are like, “No, this is really good.” They can't believe it. Oh, I almost forgot one of the ingredients. Let me write that down. Garlic and what's the other one? I forgot what it's called. Why am I blanking? What's that? Oh, ginger. Okay, we go. Alright, so here are the ingredients. I'll run through these quickly and if you want to come back, you can listen to these if you want to write this down. Actually, we can put in the show notes. Let's put the smoothie recipe in the show notes. It's a great idea. All right. So, 1.5 cups of lemon juice, one tablespoon of organic MCT oil, which if you don't know what that is, it was made popular by Dave Asprey with Bulletproof coffee but it's a great source of fat for your brain to start in the morning. So, it's made from organic coconut so it's MCT oil, which stands for medium-chain triglyceride oil. Then I put in about three tablespoons of organic flax seeds. I put in a handful of organic walnuts. I put in one organic, well, everything's organic so I don't want to say organic.

One orange. I put in three cloves of garlic. Now, this might be the one where you go, "What? Garlic in a smoothie?” So, garlic is one of the, again, of all the foods that heal cancer, that's one of the best. It has a lot of health benefits. I would encourage you to start with one clove of garlic like I built up to three but I started with one. One clove of garlic and again, just try this. You'll be surprised at how good this tastes. And if it tastes too garlicky, of course, next time you make it, don't put any garlic in. And of course, you can modify this whole recipe to suit your tongue. Like the next ingredient is ginger. Ginger is again one of the most healthy cancer healing but just in general, one of the healthiest foods you can put in your body. And so, I don't even know how to measure it. I use a lot of organic ginger, more ginger than garlic. It's probably three, four, or five times as much ginger as garlic. And if you don't like ginger, just leave out the ginger. If you don't like garlic, leave out the garlic. So, that's it.

So, three cloves of garlic, three big, you know, I'd say three big inch-and-a-half long big chunks of ginger. So, I put in three big chunks of ginger. I put in a handful of spinach. I put in a handful of blueberries. And that's the basis of the smoothie. Sometimes I'll put in organic vanilla, unsweetened coconut milk. So delicious. It has a great tasting, organic, unsweetened vanilla coconut milk. The brand is So Delicious, but it is it's literally so delicious that it’s properly named. And then I put in a lot of powders. This is why my smoothie recipe takes so long. It's mostly the powders. And I'm not looking at them right now. So, I’ll read up as many as I can remember. But these are basically instead of taking these as supplements and having to digest all these capsules, I get these organic powders of different vegetables, fruits, and herbs that have health properties and I just throw them in the smoothie.

So, I put in first and foremost vanilla plant protein. It's a plant-based vanilla organic plant protein, so I put that in first and foremost. That has a big impact on the taste. And then I put in an organic or forget the organic. I put in, yes, organic but it's ginseng powder for energy. This is the energizing, life-giving, cancer-healing smoothie. I'll put in a couple of tablespoons of organic green tea. I put in the ginseng as well for energy. I put in dandelion root. And I'm not going to explain why I put all these in. Google if you want to know any particular ingredient but they're all very healthy for you. I do put in collagen protein. I think that's the only non-plant-based ingredient. I do that because I've got a shoulder injury and it's to help heal the cartilage in my shoulder. And you can get vegan collagen now. I'm going to probably get that next. I just discovered that was an option. And then I put in acerola cherry powder, A-C-E-R-O-L-A. I recommend that for everybody. That is a natural source of vitamin C. What I was talking about earlier that most supplements are synthetic manmade supplements that are sold in the US. It's a very small percentage of companies that use organic food-based whole food ingredients. But acerola cherry powder, it's 500% of your daily vitamin C allowance in one teaspoon of that powder. So, that goes in every smoothie.

I put in Makkah powder. I put in chia seeds. So, there's a bunch of different healthy powders I put in. So, I'm not going to list them all. We'll all figure it out. I'll put them in the show notes, maybe get all the different powders in there. But that's my morning smoothie. And it fills up two 16-ounce big cups like it's 32 ounces of smoothie. And I drink one after, oh, I didn't tell you or I almost left out the most important or my favorite ingredient. The last thing I do after my smoothie is and I blend it all up. Oh, I also use these little packets of blue-green algae that you can get them frozen. The company, what's it called? B-Alive. I'll put all this in the show notes. I'll give the whole list of this to my podcast producer and we'll get all this in the show notes. So, the smoothie recipe will be in there with every powder that I use. Oh, what I was going to say is the ninja trick is frozen avocado chunks. So, I get it at Costco. I don't know if I would have the discipline to do this if I didn't get into Costco, but they actually make organic frozen avocado chunks that are already separated in little three-quarter-inch chunks.

Once the smoothie is blended, and I use ice by the way. I use half a cup of ice. So, 8 ounces of half of a 16-ounce cup of ice, pour that in at the end. So, first, I blend everything then I've dumped the ice and I blend that for 10 seconds. Then I get the organic frozen avocado chunks, I pour those on top, I pour in basically a handful, and then I only blend it for 10 seconds so they don't fully blend. And what it does is it gives the smoothie a creamy consistency but I've learned the amount of time to blend it enough to where it keeps the avocado chunks as chunks. And this may be gross to you. For me, it is my favorite, I like drinking the smoothie, and then I'll have this nice chewy, semi-frozen avocado chunks throughout the whole thing. So, that's a little bonus tip for you.

And then how I structure my workday. It's pretty simple. So, I think you've gotten most of the detail between the SAVERS and the smoothie. As far as the workday goes, here's how I structure my workday. I don't start until 9 AM, right? I’m with family from 8 to 9 and making a smoothie. And then from 9 to 12, I work and I typically focus on my mission first and foremost. So, like what's the single most important goal or outcome that I'm committed to right now in my life? I work on that first. So, usually, that’s from 9 to depending on the day and what I need to get done, it's 9 to 10 or it's 9 to 10:30, 9 to 11. Sometimes it’s even 9 to 12. So, recently, I was going through the Miracle Morning Movie and like, we're basically doing the last final editing, which we already did the final editing but then I discovered stuff when I watched it again. After I got off chemo, my brain was working better and I'm like, "Oh, man, I feel like we need to make some more changes.”

So, this last week, every day for like from 9 to noon, I would spend up to three hours just watching the movie, pausing it, rewinding it, pausing it, watching it, watching other versions of it, trying to piece it all together to make the best possible as close to perfect film as we possibly can. But that's an example of how my mission that the last week or so was the movie. And so, that was the first part of these every day was focusing as much time as I needed on my mission. Then I ate lunch from 12 to 1, and then from 1 until it depends. Some days it's 1 to 5. I'll work until 5. A lot of days I try to get up early and hang out with my kids at usually 2 or 3.  It just depends on the day or depends on the activities that we have planned but then I'll do my work. And I usually break my work up into hour chunks or 1 hour to 90-minute chunks of, okay, I'm going to work on this project for these 90 minutes, whether it's answering emails or prepping for a speech I have coming up or whatever it is, writing, and that sort of thing.

So, that's my schedule Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I don't schedule any appointments on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, because I've learned that for me, I'm happiest when I have nothing in my schedule. In fact, I just read that to you of that fact versus story sheet, right? The fact was I have meetings in my schedule. The story was I don't want to have meetings in my schedule. Well, the truth is I don't particularly it's not my favorite. I've listened to my intuition. Having meetings is not my favorite. I like being able to wake up and have a full day open to do whatever I want. And then when I say what I want, I mean I'm still working but whatever project I feel like not, "Oh, at this time, I have to talk to this person or do this interview or whatever.” I prefer to not have that structure in my schedule. I like the freedom. As you can see, from what I've shared today, I have a ton of structure in my schedule. I structure it, but I also structure in freedom. So, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the majority of my workdays, 60% of my five workdays have nothing scheduled in them that isn't totally flexible, and only changeable unless I want to change it.

Then Tuesday and Thursday are the only days when I schedule meetings, calls, podcasts, interviews, that sort of thing. My schedule is roughly the same until 1 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then I have usually a 1:15 and a 2:15 opening in my schedule where people can schedule things. And then on Thursday, same thing, so 1:15, 2:15 PM. So, there's four appointments a week typically where I will schedule a meeting. One of those I have with my team on Thursday morning at 11. So, that's the schedule. And then the weekends, I have the same morning routine, but I hang out with a family. So, I want to keep this an hour or one hour and one minute. So, that's everything that I can think of in terms of the daily, the weekly schedule, and the various components of the rituals and routines that I practice. Again, I feel it's pretty OCD, same things day in and day out. I eat the same things. For lunch, by the way, I typically make a big salad. For dinner, I typically eat whatever my wife makes, and she's a great cook. She makes awesome food, very blessed in that department. And that's it.

So, I would love, by the way, to hear your routine or your ritual. I want to learn from you. I'm always trying to learn as much as I can. So, if you're up for it, if you have any questions, by the way, you can post these of course underneath the episode on the website at HalElrod.com/Podcast or this episode will be 333. So, this episode, you can go to HalElrod.com/333. If you have any questions, let me know or I'd love to hear if you have any cool things you're doing in your Miracle Morning or to structure your schedule in any way, please let me know. I would love to hear about it. So, I hope that was valuable for you. I felt I always hesitate to do episodes that center around me because it's a feeling of narcissism or something. I hope it didn't come across that way but since this is a question, I thought, all right, now's as good a time as any to share with you guys and gals some things that I'm doing and I hope that some of those, not all of them I'm sure, but some of those may resonate with you and that you can try them on for yourself. That's another thing to let me know is if you need to share your schedule, but if there's any of these that resonated with you, I'd love to know what you're going to try incorporating in your daily rituals. And then of course, again, if you want the smoothie recipe, we'll put those in the show notes at HalElrod.com/333. I’m out of breath.

[CLOSING]

Hal Elrod: All right, goal achievers, I'm about to jump in the car with my wife and kids to drive to Houston to get tested for cancer, which I do quarterly. And this will be the last quarterly test and then I get to move to every six months, which is exciting. And then I don't know how long you do that but eventually, it goes to once a year. So, things are moving in a positive direction and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your love and support. It's meant so, so much over the years. I love you, I appreciate you, and I will talk to you all next week. Take care, everybody.

[END]