Welcome back to Lending Leadership: The Mortgage Pros, your go-to resource for leadership insights and best practices in the mortgage industry.

Today, we dive into a deceptively simple but transformative subject: the power of a disciplined morning routine. No external guest this episode, just us, your regular hosts, getting real about what separates high performers in our field. We explore how winning the morning can mean winning the day, personally and professionally.

We break down our own struggles and triumphs around developing and sticking with (or sometimes falling off) a consistent morning routine. We discuss how the morning doesn’t start with an alarm but with how you wind down the night before, and why consistency always trumps intensity. We cover everything from the best time to wake, what to do first (hint: water beats coffee), how to adjust routines when life doesn’t cooperate, and the ripple effect our habits have on leadership and team culture.

We also geek out about sleep trackers, share stories from the trenches about trying and failing to get up at 5 am, and outline actionable, realistic ways to nudge your routine forward, no matter your starting point. It's all about stacking little wins, giving ourselves grace, and focusing on continual improvement (kaizen, anyone?).

Key takeaways:

1. Your Morning Routine Starts the Night Before:
2. We emphasize that a strong, consistent morning routine is impossible without a good nighttime routine. How and when you go to bed directly impact your ability to wake up intentionally and get ahead of your day (03:15).
3. Start Small and Stack Successes:
4. Success doesn’t come from suddenly waking at 4:30 am if you’ve never done it. Instead, gradually shift your bedtime and wake time, and begin building your morning habits slowly, like making your bed, reading just five pages, or taking a short walk (00:20, 19:31).
5. Consistency Beats Intensity:
6. We discuss how showing up every day, even if it’s with smaller actions, always wins over sporadic bursts of effort. Whether it’s exercise, reading, or even just drinking water as the first step, small, regular actions compound over time (02:38, 19:52).
7. Routines Drive Mental Resilience:
8. Developing and sticking to a routine has a massive impact on mental health and resilience. From handling loan stress to managing difficult clients, having a routine helps us feel less reactive, more present, and able to better serve our teams and clients (18:09).
9. Leaders Set the Tone for Teams and at Home:
10. We recognize that our habits and routines don’t just improve our own productivity—they provide powerful modeling for our teams and families. Consistent routines inspire others, build credibility, and quietly shape a high-performance culture (21:14).

There’s no magic bullet or flashy hack. Just a lot of real talk, mutual accountability, and a reminder that the best investment we make in ourselves is continual self-improvement—whether that’s professional coaching or the simple act of drinking a glass of water before coffee.

We hope this episode inspires you to take that first small step toward a morning routine that works for you and to give yourself grace when life throws a curveball. Thanks for listening and leading alongside us!

Robert, Tom, and Dave

Reading that's helped. Consistent exercise has helped. I mean I just ran an ultra marathon in May. I'm doing a 40 mile trail walk in a week and a half. I'm running the marathon in the fall. And it's, it's all because I've been getting up earlier and, and I have more time and I'm more focused.

Yeah, I remember.

I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's not magic, but you gotta slowly. You can't wake up. Yeah, I've seen people get, you know, just try to jump into waking up at 4:30. Right. You're going to hate yourself. You got to ease yourself into it. Small steps. And when you, when you accomplish something in the morning, it's like, you know, making your bed, little things like that.

It just stack little success after little success. You gain just a little bit more confidence. You know, we always talk about getting 1% better every day. Kaizen. It's just those little things and you just get a little more confidence in yourself.

Before the first email, before the first phone call, before the first loan application even comes in, there's a choice. Do you start the day intentionally or are you going to spend the rest of the day reacting? Today on lending leadership with the mortgage pros, we're talking about why some of the most successful people we know have one thing in common. They win the morning. And as a result, they often win the day. Dave, Tom, good to see you guys. How are y'?

All?

Good to see you too, brother.

Yeah, guys. Yeah, this is, this is one of your favorite topics, Dave.

It is, yeah.

It's, it's certainly become one of my favorite topics over the last couple years.

Yeah, you're, you're super regimented in the morning, brother. And, and to be real, like, I have a high level admiration to just your commitment and dedication to your morning routine, especially given that you're a nut job and have four kids. Like, to be able to be consistent with it is like, it's not an easy task and you do a really good job with it.

Thank you. Yeah, I mean the key for me and this has developed over the last couple years is it's been refined. It wasn't always this way, but I've become a lot more organized and efficient as a result of it, quite frankly. It's just getting up early and then getting ahead of my kids and my family and getting stuff done that I know I wouldn't get done otherwise if I didn't get up early. Because we have a meeting that starts at 8:15, the three of us, every morning. Then we have a 9:00 clock pretty much every day except for Friday. And then we have a 10 o' clock most days as well too. So I'm the big believer that consist consistency always beats intensity in doing it day in and day out.

My wife's out of town for a week and a half in Alaska and left me with my children for 1112 days. So today was not a good morning. I woke up a little bit later and it's thrown off my entire day, as evidenced by me being late for 10 minutes for the podcast, which turns

into us starting 30 minutes late because it takes you 20 minutes to get your setup ready. But that's a different topic.

That's a different technical difficulties that we have every week.

I feel like to have to, to have a, a successful, you know, consistent morning routine, you have to have a successful, successful, consistent nighttime routine. Like how you go to bed and when you go to bed has a pretty big impact on how and when you wake up and the ability to be effective because you can't dismiss the fact that we need sleep, you know.

Absolutely.

Some people just say, oh, I want to start waking up early. Well, it means you need to start to go to bed early and you need to start to adjust a lot of things to be able to really do that consistently or you're lagging from behind and that can create a whole nother problem.

Yeah, your, your morning routine starts with your evening routine. I mean, I try to get to bed no later than 10:00pm uh, that's always my goal. Sometimes if I'm exhausted. Right. Uh, I go to bed at 9:30 and when you're waking up at 5am consistently every day, five days a week, and then it kind of, you know, bleeds into the weekend. Once you get on that routine, it's kind of hard to sleep in. So, yeah, I go to bed at 10:00am, I'm tired by 9, 9:30. I go to bed at 10.

So I need me about six and a half, seven hours of sleep. Seven hours is the goal, but I usually get six and a half and I'm well rested. I'm kind of become a nerd. I got an apple watch over Christmas and I track my sleep every night as well too. So I don't know how accurate those things are, but they're, they're accurate enough.

I, I love that you think you're just becoming a nerd. You know, one thing that I found so interesting about this morning routine and you know, you guys talking about the night leads into the morning. And I completely agree. I admittedly I, I, I have a morning routine. It's not as disciplined as yours, Dave. And it's, you know, that, that probably starts with the nights being off track for me some. But the one thing that I find so interesting about this topic is it's, it's just an extension of everything else that we talk about that is required to be, to, to be successful in our business. Right? It's discipline, it's consistency, it's having a plan on how you're going to go about something and achieve it.

It's not happenstance, it's not luck. It' meandering around. And we see this like, we see this core set of values play itself out over and over and over in every aspect of our business for those that are really successful. And I think this is just a, an extension of that. So I want to challenge myself and I'm going to ask you guys to hold me accountable to having a better we.

Oh we will.

Here we go.

This is record.

Don't edit this thread before 6:30am Typically then we move over to the normal thread. But we're happy to include you on it. Robert.

Yeah, listen, since the kids have started driving like my, my routine during school, I was up at 6:30 and I drove them to school so I had more of a routine. But now since they've started driving and we're in summer now, like forget a lot of guilty admission. A lot of our 8:15 calls, like I'm rolling out of bed at like 7:45 and you know, grabbing a quick shower, brushing my teeth and like being ready for that 8:15 call. So I need to be better. And I know a lot of mine starts at night. I'm a night owl, right? Like I was up until 12 last night. Tonight there's a basketball game on. I'm gonna watch, I'm gonna be up, we're gonna go hang out with some friends.

Life tends to get in the way of some of my like really being able to be structured.

That's my thing too. And what I, what I've done is I've, I've just given myself grace. I can't be a like. And recently things I had to readjust and I'm now trying to adjust again. I was steady like 5:45 now and that was when we started doing a call at 9am in the morning. Now we shift a call and we start our mornings talking at 8:15am and I had to, I'm still, that was like two, three weeks ago. Like I'm still getting adjusted to that. I give myself a little bit of grace because there's some things that throw me off.

Yes, a late game, kids, school sometimes. Some mornings I have Austin travel, you know, three times a week. I'm not, you know, three, three times a month. I'm not waking up in my bed for a day or two or three in the week and, you know, and that really throws you off. So I learned to kind of give myself a little bit of grace. And I try to, I try to look at my morning routine like my get up early morning routine, kind of like my workout routine. Because when I do get up early, I always get the workout in. So I try to do that, you know, four days a week and then try to have some other type of routine when it's not going to be the normal 5am try to have some routine around it and give myself a little bit of grace.

But I, I would, I would love to get there to the 5am club every day and, and, and have, you know, a lot of productivity done by 8am I'm pretty decent about it.

5am Seems a little.

Sometimes you got to make sacrifices to get it done right. Like instead, you know, you're out with friends watching the Knicks game tonight. Instead of being out till 10:30, you peace out at halftime. I mean, it's, it's stuff like that that you have to do. It's boring. You're not going to win any medals. No one's going to say, look at Robert. It's just how you show up in the morning kind of sets the entire day.

Like Lindsay, my wife went away on last Thursday and I got up with her at 4:30. Right. Got up at 4:30, got an extra half an hour, 45 minutes. Rest of my day was awesome. I got so much accomplished. And I don't have some crazy morning routine where I'm meditating or standing on my head or journaling. Like, I have a pretty strict thing that I do every single day, including the weekends. It's not that hard, it's not that impressive, but it gets it done for me.

What is that, Dave? What does it look like? What's the morning routine look like? And how has it evolved throughout your career? Like what, you know, what steps have you taken to kind of bring it along?

Yeah, I mean, it, it started with just going to bed earlier and waking up earlier. Right. It used to be shit. I really didn't have one. I'd wake up scrambling every day. Right. I'd get right on my phone, check emails, and then I'd be in someone else's world, right? Someone else would own my morning. People hear that and it sounds hokey, but it's true.

So when I get up, my alarm goes off at 5, 10am I get up right away. I very rarely hit snooze. I chug. What's that?

I'm a snoozer, bro.

Yeah, I never snoop. Here's the deal with snooze sleep, right? It's garbage sleep.

It's so garbage.

You fall asleep for like five minutes and you're up again. You're not getting real sleep.

You're torturing yourself, like literally torture.

It feels so good.

It feels good, right? It doesn't help you. So, you know, some hokiness that I do. The first thing I do is I drink like half a liter of lemon water that I put in the fridge overnight, no ice, like a quarter lemon. And I chug that as soon as I get up. And then I have these series of I know I call Poor Man's Tai Chi. It wakes up my body, wakes up my mind. That's anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes. It's all on Facebook.

But the one guy I followed initially, easy to remember, Michael Holland. In fact, our partner John in New Jersey, knows him. But I watch, I watch that. It's a series of seven to 12 moves, squats, push ups, golf swings, some more kind of mellow stuff. But it wakes me up mentally and physically. And then while I do that, I drink, I brew mushroom coffee, which sounds hokey too, but it helps with your digestion. Hold on, hold on, hear me out. Helps with your digestion and it doesn't give you that caffeine spike right out of the glove.

But then I drink two regular cups of coffee too, but I drink that first,

so.

And then I try to read for a half an hour and 40 or 45 minutes before I even look at my email or my text messages. And I'm reading almost. I'll read three books a month this year. Read or listen to three books a month. So I'm getting be before 6am, 6:15am, before I even, you know, open up my laptop or look at my phone. I've already, you know, read for 45 minutes to an hour, did a really soft workout to get my body moving and I'm dialed in. And then I usually hit email for 45 minutes and by 7am either running, hiking, doing yoga in the gym, lifting, and then I pop in the sauna probably five or six days a week. And that's, that's all before 8:15am and if I'm really dialed in, I'm showered and shaved before a 15 call.

That almost never happens by the way.

Just so you know, fair.

That's. Well, we move from 8, from 9am to 8:15. That kind of screwed me up a little bit. Extra 45 minutes. It means a lot.

We were at a conference day where they talked about the, the, the morning water and, and I changed it immediately. I'd left that conference I, because I used to wake up and drink two cups of coffee before I thought a whole lot like I literally needed coffee to even the first cup was like I'm half asleep and then the second cup I'm starting, right? And then I realized like I would be dehydrated in the morning. You know, I didn't realize it till I have this epiphany here in her talk. And I, I do 16 ounces of water is the first thing I do. I wake up, I grab ice cold in my, in my fridge. Water that's just, you know, cold and just down and just. It changed the way, the way my morning starts because then I still have my coffee. But I, I like, I'm not working from a negative from, from caffeine and, and dehydrated.

It's been a, been a big. I think water is one of the things that just forget morning routines. Just routines like water. Drinking water is one of the things that's easiest to control that has one of the biggest impacts on everything we do. Every way you feel.

Well, if you think about the morning and you've slept for six to eight hours, you've not drank a drop of water, so you're dehydrated. I might be the most well hydrated person. You guys know I chug water all day. But yeah, I mean little, little simple things like that, right? Just waking up and drinking water and moving a little bit and holding off on your first cup of coffee for maybe half an hour, 20 minutes as your body wakes up because your body's naturally going to wake up, right. You know, and just moving back your wake up time 15 minutes a week. Going to bed 15 minutes early and getting a new circadian rhythm going. I mean there's a zillion podcast and books on it. A great one I like is the 5am Club.

That's good. And wow, what's the one I just handed out at the, at the sales rally? Morning Miracle. Wow, I forgot that. So Morning miracle is a great one. We hand it out to all the ellos. And I was surprised. A lot of, a lot of our loan officers really took a lot from my talk at our sales rally. And we have some that have really dialed in morning routine.

Some of our most successful executives and loan officers have a very disciplined morning routine that they follow every day. And they get a lot done before the day starts at 8 or 9am

let's talk some simple ways, Dave, because it's not like you have a pretty dialed in routine. Right. You know, on time, the time you get up to how you're reading and you know what, what exactly you're getting done. But it doesn't like start like that. Right. So let's say you're, you're Robert. Let's coach Robert here. He's waking up at, you know, 30 minutes before the day starts.

What do you think are some of the simple, simple things?

What step one, step one, back up your bedtime from midnight to 11:00pm, right. And then get up at 6:30. That, that's step one. You got to get your wife on board with that too. Right. Especially if you have a TV in your room. Step one's probably getting the TV out of your room. I don't have, I've never had a TV in my room, nor will I ever have a tv.

I like a TV in a room.

Yeah, see, but so Lace, lace falls asleep. 9:30, 10:00', clock, she's out and the kids go to bed, you know, 10, 10, 30, they're up in their room. So that like, I don't control the TV in my house. I'm a weak, weak man. So that 10 to midnight that you got your window. I got like, that's, that's my time. You know what I mean? Yeah.

I watch the same TV show as my wife. We, we generally, we generally watch the same show. I don't vary from that.

I literally avoid the shows. I avoid getting into shows because I know it's going to mess with me staying up late because that's really the only time I count. I'm not waking up in the morning and watching a show.

Yeah.

Now I got sucked into a new show, your Friends and Neighbors. And I like, I'm probably gonna stay up late every night this week trying to get through the second episode. Second season.

Yeah. Again, I, I just make sure if, if I'm up past 10 on a school night, I feel like I'm doing something wrong because I know I got to get up at 5 and I think I'm going to be Tired, like I lost track of time last night, put the kids to bed late. I didn't go to bed till 10:45 and I'd been riding the struggle bus all day. I can feel it, right? And they get as much done. You know, I had, you know, a half effort workout. I'm lying to myself and I'm gonna go home and work out today, which will never happen. So, you know, if you come home exhausted at the end of the day, you know you're not going to work out. You got to get it done in the morning.

Right. And that's one of my non negotiables I exercise seven days a week. Even if it's something like a 20 minute or half an hour hike. Seven days a week, every week. I can't tell you the last time I missed a workout, probably at a conference we were at. But even then I usually run in the morning, force myself to do it.

Do you guys ever feel like you hit like a midday wall? Like you're just like man two, three o' clock, like it. Whether it's every day? Yeah. What do you do to overcome that?

I do 10, 15 minutes of movement where I walk, walk around my building.

Yeah, I've been doing more of that. You got, because you can't lay, you know, lay down. Just, just, just makes it, makes it a little bit worse.

So Dave, what do you think the, what do you think the, the mental impact of all of this is? I mean, we know mortgage is a mindset business. You know, you gotta have, we've talked about this in the past. Like you gotta have the right mindset. You gotta be able to handle the stress and the uncertainty and all the ups and downs side to side roller coaster. So how do you think that this morning routine that you have, how does that play into the mental stability to deal with this business?

I mean, honestly, I become probably 50% less stressed. I'm more resilient during the day and I truly, truly mean that stuff does not bother me like it used to. Deal goes sideways, I get yelled at by a customer or realtor partner, a mistake is made. I, I'm more resilient and I'm able to kind of rise above it.

And that's doing, that's doing what, what level of production?

I mean, I'll probably close if we get re fives or not, I'll be close to 90 million this year. If we get refis, it'll be over 100 million.

Yeah. And do you think that like you attribute most of that to the Implementation of the morning routine or do you think it's because you've just. You're just getting older and mellowing out because you're old? Probably a little.

Probably a little column from a little column B. Probably a little. Probably a little both. And I did get your backhanded swipe there. So all good. But. No, but I mean, definitely it has helped. Reading that's helped.

Consistent exercise has helped. I mean, I just ran an ultramarathon in May. I'm doing a 40 mile trail walk in a week and a half. I'm running the marathon in the fall. And it's, it's all because I've been getting up earlier and I have more time and I'm more focused.

Yeah, we can do it.

I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's not magic, but you got to slowly. You can't wake up. Yeah, I've seen people get, you know, just try to jump into waking up at 4:30. Right. You're going to hate yourself. You got to ease yourself into it. Small steps. And when you, when you accomplish something in the morning, it's like, you know, making your bed, little things like that.

It just stack. Little success after little success. You gain just a little bit more confidence. You know, we always talk about getting 1% better every day. Kaizen. It's just those little things and you just get a little more confidence of

yourself and just compounds. Right. And it really is, I think, I think, I think that's maybe why I haven't been as successful. Right? Because I say, okay, I'm going to get up at 5:30 and I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to do this. And I'm trying to do everything at once and then I don't do any of it. So I think the baby steps and just building the consistency with the discipline so it compounds on itself is probably where the win comes in. Right.

And I would say going to the gym for someone who's not been to the gym for a while is. Is a tall task. Especially like, all right, I'm gonna get up at 5am I'm gonna go to the gym four days a week. You know, I'm gonna read 20 pages a day. That's too much. Start off by just reading five pages a day, getting up a little bit earlier and walking for 20 minutes, half an hour. That walking is the most underrated exercise. And then once you kick it up, we'll get you a rucksack Robert, or weighted vest and slowly but surely, listen,

we've had this discussion, like, I can rock with the best of them, even. Even fat and out of shape. So it's technique, brother. You know, one of the things I think that, you know, maybe even goes a little under the radar with this topic and that you. You don't realize is the impact that you have, the example that you're. You're setting in the modeling that you're doing with the people that are watching who you may not even know are watching. Right. But it does, I think, put you, like, I feel like it makes you a better leader than I am, frankly, because you have the morning routine and.

And I. It's something that I don't have. How important do you think it is for. For leaders to model this behavior? You know, what. What habits do you hope maybe those watching you pick up and you. You are passing along? Like, do you ever think about that?

I mean, a little bit with my kids. Right. You know, but as a leader for the company, we always want to leave from the front. And when they. When our teammates see us doing the right thing day in, day out, they see the consistency and they say, wow, how the hell does Dave help lead the company do this high level of production? And then I kind of pull the curtain back on a little bit on my morning routine. They got to think, hey, this. This works a little bit, right? There's something there that Dave's doing that I'm not doing. And then with my kids, like, they see me reading every day, they kind of roll their eyes a little bit.

They see my wife and I working out every day. I mean, my wife's in our home gym at 6am every single day. So, yeah, I mean, it definitely has an impact. And like I said at our sales rally, I was humbled and surprised. The feedback that I got from people or feedback I got from some of our coaches, how it. How it affected them. So, you know, it definitely has an impact. And I think this has become popular, like, in social media, right?

Yeah, it's the. It's the in thing.

It's the in thing, Right. Partly because it works.

It works, right?

That's why it's the in thing.

I do remember back when I, you know, when I would be super busy, there'd be times when I'd get just buried and super busy. And I would go in the office at 5 and, you know, work to put files together and have it ready. And that three hours that I had, that five to eight window, I got more done than I would get done in Two days of, you know, between a nine to five, it's so because no one's bothering you, you're not distracted, you're not, the phone's not ringing, there's not an email that you have to answer. So I do think that, you know, there's a lot of power in that in terms of effectiveness.

And that's one of the things that I am focused on, on my morning routine is more personal development because I'm not looking at email till 6:15 or 6:30am Right. So from like 5 ish to that time, it's all me now granted, you know, by 8 o' clock or 9 o', clock, I've already worked for an hour, an hour and a half. During that time, besides clearing urgent emails that I didn't get to yesterday or stuff that comes overnight, I try to have one kind of focus, deep thinking project that I need to do that I won't be interrupted on because that's the time when no, no one's tugging at us and no one, but no one's bothering us.

Yeah, that makes sense.

It's become cliche because I think it works.

All right, I've set the challenge. I'm gonna, I'm gonna start moving the needle a little bit. We'll see how it goes.

We will see me to start texting you in the morning to check on you.

I mean, let's, let's start it like, I don't know, maybe seven right now.

Okay, we'll, we'll start at seven.

Listen, you said, you said start small and work from there. I'm not, I have no intentions of getting to a 530. Like a 6 is probably good for me.

Okay.

Okay.

I like it. I like it.

As, as we round to wrap up, guys, our producer Rachel's given a question that we're going to each answer. And it, it can be, you know, whatever, whatever the answer is, it can be off topic, but I think this is a cool question, a good takeaway. So we're each going to finish this sentence. The best investment I've ever made in myself was. What was it? I'll, I'll tell you mine. My. The best investment I ever made in myself was professional coaching.

I was going to say the same exact thing because it's professional first. Yeah, I mean, I'll put a different one out there. Mine is coaching because it changed my life and changed my business. Number two would probably be reading on a consistent basis because I'm just downloading so much knowledge to my brain and it's changed my way of thinking on a lot of stuff.

Yeah, I mean, I, I have to say coaching because I think it also started just mentality of wanting to be the best I could be and things that led to, you know, the, the way you live your lifestyle, the way you eat and sleep and all those types of things. So I would definitely say coaching, but I think we have to continue to invest in ourselves differently, you know, constantly.

I mean, we're, we're all, the three of us. I would humbly say we're high performers. Right. And all of us are still coached. We're still coached on a regular basis. We're still, still learning. We're humble enough to know that we don't have all the answers, you know, and I, I think that's so important to, you know, all the highest performers are still coached.

All down. All right, gents, Great conversation. I've enjoyed it as always. Thank you guys everyone for, for turning in and tuning in and to this episode of Lending Leadership with the Mortgage Pros. Hey, listen, go ahead and leave us that five star review. Hit the like and subscribe button so you can get all the episodes to whatever platform you're listening to us on. Remember, the best leaders aren't always the smartest people in the room. They're often the most disciplined.

Hope you guys got a good takeaway. See you next time.