Are you having trouble starting your day off on the right foot? Do you find yourself constantly lacking the motivation to get out of bed in the morning?

Erik Allen, host of The Erik Allen Show, reveals his daily morning routine and tips on how you too can get your mind focused and start each morning with purpose and success.

Morning routines are the foundation that has helped Erik become more productive in his work life, spiritual life, making his show one of the top ranked podcasts, and developing a closer relationship with God.

Redeem Your Business Today by The Following:

How can we honor God in our business?

Draw close to God outside of business. Your business won’t be able to run smoothly if you don’t establish a personal connection with him outside of your work. Spend time daily growing your relationship with God through Bible reading and prayer.

One challenge from today:

Your past, and other people’s opinions of you does not define your future.

Ways to start your morning off on the right foot:

• Gratitude: Give thanks onto God for allowing you see another day
• Pray: Take some time to pray or meditate
• Read the Bible: Read then write down a verse to keep in mind throughout the day
• Read for learning
• Exercise: Even if it is for 10-15 minutes
• Make a to-do list of your tasks the night before
• Make up your own routine by adding one thing at a time of what is most beneficial for you

More About Erik Allen

Podcast: The Erik Allen Show

LinkedIn: Erik Allen

YouTube: Erik Allen Show

Website: Erik Allen Media

More About David Schmidt

Subscribe to Redeeming Business Today Podcast Newsletter

Website redeemingbusinesstoday.com

Follow The Leadership Journey of Moses. Sign up to receive leadership lessons in your inbox.

LinkedIn

Donate to the Show

Mentioned in this episode:

Time Saving Masterclass

FREE Time Saving Masterclass to move you from overwhelm and crazy busy to peace, being in control, and a fulfilling life. Learn how to create space to get your important work done and how to escape from analysis paralysis. Come away with a vision for an abundant future and first steps to begin your journey. Attend Your FREE Time Saving Masterclass today.

Time Saving Masterclass

Step Up Referrals

Ever wished you had all your business information in one place? With Step Up Referrals, you can! It’s the ultimate digital referral card that makes sharing your business and showcasing who you’re connected with easier than ever. Step Up Referrals helps you stand out from the crowd, build relationships, and grow your network. Follow the link below and get started today.

Step Up Referrals

David:

[0:00] Well, hello, everyone. I'm super excited to have with me today Erik Allen from The Erik Allen Show. He's ranked the top 1.5% of all podcasts globally. He had a rough start in life, complicated childhood, and a broken family, but he gave his life to Jesus at 24 and did a 180 in his life and is now encouraging others and helping them find hope in life. Welcome to the Redeeming Business Today podcast, Erik. Glad to have you.

Erik:

[0:24] David, it's an honor to be on your show, man. I truly appreciate it.

David:

[0:27] Yeah. I appreciate you too. So, one thing I like to ask people is what is one way you believe we can honor God in our business that others may not know about?

Erik:

[0:37] I think you honor God by drawing close to him outside of the business, right? Like if you're not drawing close to him, just you and him take the business part out of it, then you're not honoring your business. I think there's a lot of people that say, well, yeah, I want to, I want to, you know, we tithe and things like that. And you should definitely do that. but your business is not going to run smoothly and honoring God if you're not personally connected to him. And so you have to have that quiet time in the morning and start your day off that way and being grateful about that. And that's what really helps, I think, blow up the business in honoring God the right way.

David:

[1:12] Very good. Thanks for that confirmation. I love that. Yeah. And a lot of people, there's a lot of things you can do in business, but so much of it, it's not a step-by-step playbook as much as what's your relationship with God? Are you following God? are you listening to him? And that's huge, huge in life. Absolutely.

David:

[1:29] So why don't you take a few minutes, if you would, tell us about your journey, a little bit about your childhood, growing up, how Jesus came into your life, changed, and where you are today.

Erik:

[1:38] Yeah. I grew up going to church. We went to Sunday school and my dad would take us to play little league when I was a kid. And then my dad would take my best friend, Dave, and I literally throw some dumpsters on the weekends and say, go find treasure. That was just this fun thing that we did as a kid. And I'll look back going, I don't know if I would have done that, but it was, it was super fun. Like I, there's super core memories of that. And, uh, my parents ended up getting divorced when I was 11 years old. And then my mom got together with me and it was very physically abusive almost immediately. And I didn't understand why she stayed with that man. And it was like this rinse and repeat cycle. She would, you know, get beat up and the, I would call the police, they'd show up. She wouldn't press charges. And it was like, okay, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat over and over. And then they did the smart thing when I was in the middle of my eighth grade year, they got pregnant. And they decided to move us from Washington state out to Stevensville, Montana. It was a population of about 1,200 people. And we weren't even in the town. We were on the outskirt of town. So we were off the highway. So we had literally had five acres of property that they rented. It was a beautiful property right by the Bitterroot River. The problem was the house had three bedrooms. And it was one for them, one for my little brother, who's a few months old at that time. And then one for my younger sister, who's four years younger than me. And they said, Erik, would you get to live in the garage? And so I literally had this plastic tarp that separated the truck that pulled in to my bed on the left side of the truck or the garage there.

Erik:

[2:57] Luckily, my half had the fireplace in it, so it kept me semi-warm in the middle of the winters of Montana. But the abuse continued. And there was a moment when I was about 13, 14 years old, I was brushing my teeth and wasn't walking with the Lord at this time. But I remember brushing my teeth. They came up arguing. Wasn't anything different than any other night. But I felt God just going, man, you got to turn around. You got to see what's going on. And so as I stuck my head out the hallway and looked down the hall towards the kitchen, to the pantry, to the garage door my bedroom was at, I see this man on top of my mom, just boom, boom, punch her in the face over and over. And I had 20 seconds of courage and I walked up and I grabbed a cast iron pan from the cupboard and I swung as hard as I could and I split the back of his head open. And he turned around and he said, what then is he did that? I smacked him again in the forehead and split his forehead open.

Erik:

[3:46] And I had swung so hard the second time I actually fell over. And I remember being on the ground and he was standing up on me, he was bleeding me or he was bleeding. My mom jumps up like mama bear, punch him like six times in a row. There's blood splatting on the wall, this crazy movie scene. Police finally show up, take him to jail. My mom doesn't press charges. It wasn't much longer after that. I had about three months left in my freshman year of high school in Stevensville, Montana there. And I got kicked out. So I went and stayed with my buddy and finished out my freshman year and then moved back to Tri-Cities, Washington to live with my dad. And he rented a house for him and I, and he put Hunger Man meals in the house, cereal milk in the house, made sure I had food, put 20 bucks in a cup each week. And that was my lunch money for the week while I was a sophomore through senior in high school. But the problem was he would go stay with his girlfriend most nights. So I'd see him a few times a month in passing was all. And so it gave me a lot of freedom to do whatever the heck I wanted. And so I started to get into drugs early on. I was smoking pot. I was taking acid, mushrooms, whatever I could get my hands on. And by the time I was 18 years old, while still a senior high school, I got arrested for having a bong, which is really funny because now in Washington, it's legal to walk around with a bong in your hand. But when I was a senior, it was not.

Erik:

[4:55] And I had to go stay the night in Dayton, Washington. It was an old school jail. In fact, I just closed it down like a year ago, I found out. But black and white chain gang outfit on, I was 145 pounds, just a scrawny dude. And I got thrown into this open cell with 15 or 16 other grown men who were in there for much worse than having a bong. And I just remember the only thing I could bring in with me was a Bible. And I, so I brought my dad's Bible with me and I brought it in. I sat down to the table and I just started reading the Genesis.

Erik:

[5:24] And I thought if I, two things, I thought if I brought this Bible on, two things would happen. One, God would forgive me. And two, God would keep me safe. And I believe he did both of those things. I was in and out 24 hours, didn't have a cellmate. Right. And, but I didn't learn my lesson. I went right back to doing everything that I was doing before. And so I spent the next, you know, several years trying to figure out this thing called life. Two weeks after I graduated high school, I got kicked out of my dad's house. I woke up to a post-it note on the bathroom mirror that said, you can't comply with house rules. You have 48 hours to get out.

Erik:

[5:55] So between the ages of 18 and 21, I moved 21 times, living off of couches here, couches there. And one of those moves was to Seattle, Washington. I was living off of credit cards. And by the time I was 21, I was $28,000 in debt and ended up filing bankruptcy. And then I went and landed this job with Universal Records, which I actually had the lie to get. I had to tell him I was in college, which I really wasn't. I printed a receipt. I paid $300 for a receipt from the local college. Never went to a class, but took it to Universal. Look, I'm in college. They allowed me in as an intern, and then I ended up landing a full-time job there. I did that for about a year, but the problem was when you're addicted to drugs and alcohol, like I was, being a rockstar lifestyle doesn't help your addictions. So I was hanging out backstage with rockstars and living the rockstar lifestyle without being a rockstar. And then my one-year anniversary came around. I got laid off because of a thing called Napster, which just absolutely killed the music industry. And so I was down in this super depressed mode, and I was working at Starbucks as a night manager and I would get off work and go get a beer and go back to my, you know, ghetto apartment and rent in Washington and drink myself to sleep every night. And one night there was a girl that was at Starbucks that doesn't drink coffee and said, Hey, we've got a college age event down our church. Would you want to go? And I was depressed. I had no friends and she was good looking. Yep. What time doing? I'd be there.

Erik:

Erik:

[7:45] And I called that girl up and I got her voice moment. I said, hey, thanks for inviting me to church. Happy Easter. It was Easter morning. And, uh, not, we were 11 months later, we were actually married and we celebrated 19 years of being married this year. So we're, we're changing. Thank you. We're, you know, our goal is to break the chains of divorce, abuse, rejection, and addiction that we both kind of witnessed as a child.

David:

[8:06] Sure. Yeah. That's quite the story. And, um, yeah, God, God does change things. And sometimes it's a subtle way or sometimes it's banging over the head and it's like, look, let's get going.

Erik:

[8:18] Yeah. Yeah.

David:

[8:19] Yeah. So, and so now you are head of Erik Allen media. What do you, what do you do there?

Erik:

Erik:

[9:44] explainer videos or product videos and things like that. And so I love doing it and it's super fun.

David:

[9:50] Very good. Neat, neat. And we talked a little bit about, there's all kinds of different topics we could talk about. And you mentioned about having the importance of a morning routine. And I never read the book, but I heard about the miracle morning, the miracle morning, I forget the guy's name. But yeah, talk to us a little bit about a morning routine. Why is that important for people?

Erik:

Erik:

Erik:

David:

Erik:

David:

Erik:

David:

Erik:

David:

Erik:

David:

Erik:

David:

Erik:

Erik:

David:

Erik:

David:

Erik:

Erik:

David: