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Join MaryRuth and special guests as they dive deep into the world of health, wellness, and purposeful living. Each episode is a fresh, inspiring conversation with thought leaders, health experts, and everyday changemakers who share practical tips and empowering stories to help you take meaningful steps toward your best self. Whether you're seeking motivation, holistic guidance, or just a little joy in your wellness journey—this podcast is here to help you move forward every day.
Mental health is health and wellness. And so investing in yourself, how am I doing? What could I do better tomorrow morning? What can I do better at work? Could I wash up and turn my phone off an hour before I actually go to bed?
MaryRuth:Could I read a magazine or a book that I love? And then putting this all in a package together. The Move Forward Everyday podcast, we all get twenty four hours in a day to have freedom to experience joy. What is important to you? Who are you?
MaryRuth:And what makes you happy? Hi, my name is Mary Ruth, and I am the founder and CEO of Mary Ruth Organics. We are a vitamin brand that has been around for almost twelve years, and this is our first episode of the Move Forward Everyday podcast where we will be covering topics with all of our guests on morning routine, nighttime routine, time blocking, the compound effect, what I like to call gratitude frequency and believing in yourself. This is a very special first episode where I am going to spend ten to fifteen minutes telling you what I have learned in the last twenty years through the process of having a morning and nighttime routine and time blocking and the compound effect. And next week, my personal executive coach Eric will be our guest on our second episode of the Move Forward Everyday podcast.
MaryRuth:So the first thing I wanted to share is this idea of we all get twenty four hours in a day. There are twenty four hours in every single day, and I know that so many people want to have more time to do the things that they love, to have freedom, to experience joy. And I've been in rooms with people, and I've said, okay, everyone raise your hand if you wish that you had more time to do the things that you love. And I have never seen like a hand not go up the whole room, everyone. This is kind of a universal connection or a universal concept that people want more freedom to do the things they love.
MaryRuth:First, the whole point of this podcast is really just add value to your own personal life. So if you are listening, you can write on your iPhone notes, you could take out a journal, you can take out a piece of paper, but it is my wish that through listening to this, you are able to create a life that's very meaningful to you and deeply fulfilling for you and everyone that you love. So I want to go through the idea of micro and macro and connecting that to your morning and nighttime routine. So first we're going to start off with really asking yourself in this season of life, what is important to you? Who are you?
MaryRuth:And what makes you happy? And these seem like questions that we've heard before, but I speak a lot at different high schools with teenagers, so this isn't just about the journey for adults, but it also applies to young adults. And I always say, even at our company, and Mary With Organics, when we have 20 interns in the summer, I say, Okay, who are you? What makes you happy? And where do you want to go?
MaryRuth:And so before we even think about a morning and nighttime routine, we really need to say like, who I am now is probably not who I was a year ago or five years ago. Who I am now is not who I'm going to be in a year or in five years. But really to spend time making sure that you know what makes you happy because we want to take that self awareness and reverse engineer our morning and nighttime routine. I call them the anchor times within that twenty four hour period. We want to reverse engineer that morning and nighttime routine to fit with in this season of your life and to reflect a micro action that will connect to the macro.
MaryRuth:A lot of times people say, Okay, I'm very goal oriented. It's so important to have those macro big picture goals, but we want to also make sure we're headed in the right direction, that our North Star is self love, self esteem, self awareness, what makes us happy, where are we going so that we can pick a lane and we can double triple down in this lane. This is my life's passion talking about time management, talking about getting things done within a twenty four hour period. If it was my hundredth year of life and it was the last year of my life, I don't even think that I would say that I spent my life sharing vitamins. I love vitamins because they are part of your morning routine and your nighttime routine.
MaryRuth:They are a huge part of the work that we do at Mary Ruth Organics with the team and being in service to people. But really I feel like one of the things that is so important to me to share with other people is helping them with their time management. There is more technology than ever with AI, we have more information than ever, but there is still a gap when it comes to self discipline and the ability to take all of that amazing information on the internet or to take all of that amazing information with AI. There's even AI time blocking now. But there is a gap to really execute the morning and nighttime routine on a consistent basis.
MaryRuth:So once you figure out who are you, what makes you happy, where do you want to go, you've got your lane, you've written it all down, We want to make sure we have a morning routine and nighttime routine that is going to allow us when we haven't slept or when we don't feel well or we have bills to pay or we're crumbling under the pressure. Sometimes life will just kind of smush us all the way down, and we need to be able to fight back. We need to be able to push back. We need to be able to move forward every day. And that is the name of the podcast.
MaryRuth:And so these morning routines and time blocking and the compound effect, which we're going to go over today, have been the tools that have allowed me to have structure that creates freedom. We all want that freedom, but we we do need a little structure, and that structure is morning and nighttime routines. And so let's get right into it. There are two ways to really have your morning and nighttime routine. You can use paper, which some people prefer to use their iPhone because they want to save paper for the environment, but whatever works best for you.
MaryRuth:You're going to write down your morning routine If you're using a piece of paper and you're gonna photocopy a bunch of them, they can just be like little cards so that every morning you're gonna grab that morning routine and start crossing off everything on that list. Or if it's in your iPhone notes, you're gonna write out your morning routine steps, and then as soon as you're ready to begin, you open up the iPhone, you can copy and paste two versions of it, can delete the second part, and it can be anything from stretching to taking your vitamins to sitting outside for ten minutes to get sunshine to doing twenty minutes of yoga or running. Whatever your morning routine is, you know best what is best for you. And same thing for the nighttime routine. These are your anchors where when we wake up and we're not feeling motivated or we're feeling distracted, we want to go back to those morning and nighttime routines.
MaryRuth:I once heard a favorite saying, I have two quotes I'll say here. Everyone overestimates what they can do in one year and underestimates what they can do in ten years. So what would your life look like if you were executing this morning and nighttime routine every single day, three sixty five days a year for a decade? And the other one is I saw during COVID, the New York Times wrote a quote, everyone thinks they need to feel good in order to get going. But the reality is you need to get going in order to give yourself a chance at feeling good.
MaryRuth:And that is so powerful. I'm going to say it one more time. Everyone thinks you need to feel good in order to get going, but what you actually need is to get going in order to give yourself a chance at feeling good. And that is what a morning and nighttime routine is. It's this fighting chance, regardless of what's going on in your life, to inch forward every day and it is so powerful.
MaryRuth:You know, having the business for twelve years, having four kids in three and a half years, I have used time blocking and my morning and nighttime routines as my personal practice that has allowed me to build self confidence, self esteem, and I believe in it so much I try to share it wherever I go, and especially with young adults. The idea of writing down what you say you're going to do and then actually doing it does build self esteem and self confidence. And my brother, Daniel, he passed away from a peer pressure situation as a junior in high school. So I've always been very fascinated by this idea of self esteem, self confidence, self discipline, self love, the peer pressure situations that young adults go through. And I can't say enough about the pressures that young adults go through these days between school and practice and sports and the competitive nature of social media.
MaryRuth:And so I hope that you will consider, if you are an adult listening to this, the self mastery of your own morning and nighttime routine, and then maybe share a little bit of that with your children. Or if you if you don't have children and you just mentor or are role models to people, it's something very, very valuable. I also wanted to take this opportunity before we talk about time blocking and the compound effect to talk about self discipline. So when you're able to have self discipline, it's a form of self love. We love other people the way that we love ourselves.
MaryRuth:And the actual work of cultivating, again, self love, self esteem, self awareness, self confidence is being able to do what you say you're going to do. And what's so powerful also about nighttime routines is that you really need high quality sleep, and it's something I'm working on. I have a lot of sleep issues in the last like twenty months, but they're slowly getting better. So I have empathy, and I've been there for those who are struggling with sleep. A great way to have a great morning routine is to execute your nighttime routine.
MaryRuth:I really want everyone to feel like they're the cause of their own life, not the effect, and no one knows you better than you. You have all of the answers within yourself, for you and your family, you already know what is best for you. It's just about carving out the time, five minutes, ten minutes every day, the day before the next day, to really sit with yourself, check-in with yourself. Mental health is health and wellness. And so investing in yourself, how am I doing?
MaryRuth:What could I do better tomorrow morning? What can I do better at work? Could I wash up and turn my phone off an hour before I actually go to bed? Could I read a magazine or a book that I love? And then putting this all in a package together.
MaryRuth:I've done over eighteen years of time blocking, or twenty years of time blocking. It's over one hundred and fifty thousand hours of time blocking. And there's so many amazing YouTubes, so I encourage you to read about it on ChatGPT or go on YouTube and learn more about time blocking. It is so powerful. Time blocking is a tool to help you create a compound effect in your life.
MaryRuth:A lawyer at our company, his wife works at a law firm, and I said, do you know that one minute or let's do five minutes as an example. Five minutes of complaining every single day at the end of a year is thirty hours of complaining. And by the way, sometimes we need to vent to someone we love. But wouldn't it be amazing if your time blocker said at dinnertime, you're gonna eat dinner with your kids, and then you're gonna make cookies from a bag, like a premade mixed bag. Sometimes the time blocking, writing out what you're gonna do, will allow you to have a little bit more momentum to maybe bake cookies instead of complaining.
MaryRuth:So important to watch how we use our time. And another favorite quantitative part of time is I saw on TikTok that eighteen minutes a day at the end of a year is about one hundred hours. So you could become an expert if you are using a morning routine, a nighttime routine, using tools like time blocking, learning about time blocking, understanding the compound effect. You could use eighteen minutes a day on your passion, on something that interests you. Maybe you want to learn all about art.
MaryRuth:Maybe you want to read more books. Maybe you want to stretch. Or it's like walking one mile a day compounds at the end of a year to three sixty five. A lot of times we feel like we're too busy to start anything, so we start nothing. This has been a passion topic for me researching for many, many years, and I call it micro moments.
MaryRuth:Having these little micro moments, they will compound into something and you will feel joy, happiness, progress not perfection, but progress also equals happiness. And people want to feel, even if they have to work all day and they have kids, they just want to carve out ten minutes for themselves to have that joy. And that ten minutes will compound over time. I heard a neuroscientist share recently that gratitude frequency, being in the frequency of appreciation for what you have, does three main things. It helps you manifest or do your to do list, right?
MaryRuth:We've all been overwhelmed in trying to do things on our to do list and it creates a lot of friction and it's not easy to get it done. But if you can first pause, stop, enter gratitude frequency, and then try to do everything on your to do list, it will be easier to get through that heavy lifting of tasks. Number two, being in gratitude frequency, it creates and boosts a robust immune response. So it helps you have a strong fortified immune system. And then the third thing is when you are in gratitude frequency, you feel like sharing more with other people, which I think is what we all want to do.
MaryRuth:We all want to better ourselves every single day so that we can be in service to other people and also take other people along with us on our journey, not to go alone, but to go together. So in closing, I just wanted to share that in the Move Forward Everyday podcast, Every week we're going to share someone who's important in my life and they're going share with us their morning routine, their nighttime routine, do they time block, do they believe in the compound effect, how do they use it, how do they overcome challenges. We're always going to talk about gratitude frequency. We're going to talk about believing in ourselves. I encourage and hope that this short episode will actually translate into you sitting after listening to this, going back to like, who am I, what makes me happy, how can I reverse engineer my routine within a twenty four hour period to live my best life and move forward every day and have that structure that creates freedom?
MaryRuth:It is such an honor to share things that I believe in so much with all of you.