Good Morning, Good Life, with Amy Landino – TPW276

Amy Landino is on a mission to help you go after the life you want, starting with a morning routine that launches and grounds productive days.

A good morning is key to making a good life

Amy Landino is the award-winning host of AmyTV, a YouTube series dedicated to helping women go after the life they want. She’s also the host of a fascinating podcast called Detail Therapy, an internationally popular public speaker, and a best-selling author. Amy and her husband live in Columbus, Ohio, with their adorable dog. I had a wonderful conversation with her about how she is making a life that matters!

Amy has been a YouTuber for nearly 10 years. That journey began with her passion for creating stories to share online and helping businesses do the same.

Her individual brand online has taken the direction of helping women who are going after the life they want. She talks about topics that cover more practical areas in the sense of making the most of the time that you have and what it looks like to be able to prioritize yourself. She says it's important that you understand where you are spending your time, and being clear on the reasons why you're doing what you do.

A typical day

The only typical part of Amy's day is her morning routine, which starts with her rising at 4:30 am.

The first thing she does when she wakes up is to "learn how to be human," because she is not a morning person. She calls the first half-hour of the morning the last part of her "sleep buffer period," where she is still kind of asleep, but she's also trying to wake up. During that half-hour period, she goes through her skincare routine, makes herself a glass of lemon water (Amy drinks 16 ounces of lemon water every morning) while also brewing coffee, and starts to put her thoughts together. She does Morning Pages as a mindfulness practice to deal with all the thoughts that come rushing to her. (The practice of Morning Pages is something she learned from Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way and is simply the practice hand-writing 3 pages of stream-of-consciousness writing.) It helps her clear the cobwebs of her mind.

After that, she reviews her goals and rewrites them, rewrites a passage of affirmation, gets her bullet journal ready for the tasks of the day, and then she moves into eating her first frog of the day, meaning tacking the first big task she needs to get done for when no one is bothering her. This is her opportunity to dive into what she is passionate about before the emails and requests from other people start to intrude on her day.

After that, on some days Amy gets ready to go into her office to work with her team. Other days, she is jumping on a plane to fly out of town or filming content for her YouTube channel, which is done in her home office. Her days depend on what is on deck for her, but the morning time she has with herself is how she keeps a little bit of predictability in her life, so the rest of her day can work itself out.

Amy is a fan of good sleep and doesn't recommend getting up early to get a few extra hours of your life if you haven't gotten good sleep. Amy sleeps for about 7 to 7.5 hours a night, and she is usually in bed by 9 pm, ready to drift off.

Even when Amy is on the road, she tried to keep her morning routine as consistent as possible. When she travels, she's often unable to take all her journals with her, so she'll focus on reading or do her morning pages on the notepads available in the hotel room.