What Time Do Life Coaches Go To Bed?

This is what 5 a.m. looks like in the real world.

This is a serious question because I don't get it. The numbers just don't add up. I've been watching a lot of inspirational videos on You Tube recently, I'm trying to find inspiration to do something. Anything really - doesn't matter what. I'm in a rut, it's not a secret.

Partly it's the physical conditions of one of my work places. It's a school built like a kibbutz (because it is a kibbutz). This means buildings with the rooms opening to the outside, i.e. not onto an internal corridor. So whenever you go anywhere you have to go outside to get there.

Also English is taught in smaller groups (a good thing) and the school population has grown so much over the past few years (it's a popular school) that I don't have a proper classroom to teach in. I'm either in a freezing basement bomb-shelter (the windows have holes in them for ventilation and the heater is on a weird timer) or sitting in the drafty entrance hall by the continuously used front door.

This is lovely for 6 months of the year (actually 4 because two of those months are the summer holiday) and bearable for another 2 months. However, for 4 months of the year I am freezing and spend the whole day in my coat. It's totally miserable and uncomfortable. So I actually hate three days a week from December until April.

Of course, this spills over into everything else because if you're not happy at work you're not happy. Even if you love the other two days at your other place of work - which I do.

So, back to the subject in hand - inspirational videos. Do you know what the secret  to an amazing life is? Apparently it's getting up early and doing a list of morning rituals. These include some or all of the following: meditation, mindfulness, or prayer, exercise, gratitude exercises, affirmations, journal writing, juicing, and reading at least 10 pages of something educational or motivational. It's about an hour's worth of rituals. I pity the slow readers.

Hal Elrod, author of The Miracle Morning, fabulous speaker with an amazing life-story (so far), with many You Tube videos and interviews, says that getting up at 5 a.m. is so brilliant and life-enhancing that for the past seven years he's been getting up at 4 a.m. to do his rituals. What I want to know is - what time does he go to bed at night? He has a wife and young children and presumably a social life so how can he realistically expect to be in bed by 9 p.m. in order to get the recommended seven hours sleep? [Update: I did some googling and I just now saw that Hal Elrod is battling cancer. I wish him a full and speedy recovery. In a recent podcast he says that he's bumped up his sleep from six hours to seven hours/night. I acknowledge that he might not be getting up at 4 a.m. at the moment.]

Another guy gave the game away (I couldn't find his name). He went into great detail about how he starts each day and how it sets him up for enjoying every minute of his life. He said, "I don't even need an alarm clock anymore. I naturally wake up around 8 a.m. every morning." That means he doesn't need to start work until 9.30 a.m if he works from home, which he does because he's a lifestyle guru. Translate that for people who commute to work and this wonderful message is actually only for those who can start work at 10 a.m. or later. I have to leave for the bus stop at 7.30 a.m.

Yes I could go to bed at 9 p.m and get up at 5 a.m. (I need 8 hours sleep). Of course I could. If I did that my morning routine would necessarily look like this: toilet, shower, teeth, and dress (15 minutes - 20 if I bother with what my face looks like), wash dirty dishes in the sink from last night (10 minutes), make packed lunch for DD (7 minutes - 10 if it involves hunting for her lunch-box from the previous day and washing it), put on a load of laundry (3 minutes), make coffee (3 minutes), check phone and email for any surprises (up to 10 minutes if anything needs answering or leads to a discussion), do the hour of work, grading and lesson planning that I didn't get done the night before before because I had to be in bed by 9 p.m. (1 hour), wake DD and chivy her along to full school-readiness (10 minutes - not concurrent), hang out the wet washing (12 minutes), pack my bag (3 minutes), and go down three flights of stairs and then up again because we've forgotten something (5 minutes).

I can do my inspirational and motivational reading on the 40 minute bus ride to school. And I can do more inspirational and motivational reading on the way home. This is good because I will need all the inspiration and motivation I can muster after the morning I've had.