The S.A.V.E.R.S.

Being unsure of which one he should incorporate into his life, he had the bright idea “Hey, if these six different things work for different people, what if I do all of these things? What could that do for me?” So, he implemented those into a morning routine called SAVERS. SAVERS is an acronym. S for silence, A for affirmations, V for visualization, E for exercise, R for read and S for scribe. That makes a nice acronym there, SAVERS. It’s easy to remember and it’s easy to do.

Silence

The first is Silence. It seems like in today’s world we don’t get a lot of silence, right? We get in the car and we turn the radio on, or we’re doing stuff around the house and we’ve got music playing, and we always have people around us. It’s hard to just take some time to ourselves, to sit and just focus on our thoughts. But it has so much value. Silence may just be some quiet meditation time, where you close your eyes and focus on your breathing, as you inhale and then exhale. Or maybe this is prayer time, where you are praying and listening quietly.

Affirmations

The next part is Affirmations. Affirmations are just positive statements that we repeat to ourselves to help increase our energy level. They’re positive and they’re helpful to us and they give us guidance and direction. They could be as simple as what we might call “I am” statements. “I am happy. I am free. I am helpful.” Things like that. Things that we want to improve in our lives that serve to remind us, “Hey, this is where I’m going.”

Another way you could do it is you could write out, or say something like “As I do blank, I become blank”. For example, “As I read my scriptures, I learn more about the Gospel or I learn more about Jesus Christ.” Or “As I am kind to others, they are more kind to me.” So, that might be something you could do for an affirmation.

Visualization

Visualization is the third part. It’s just like it sounds. You visualize things. This is about you telling your mind what you want, and where you want it to focus. If you know where you’re going then you’ll have a much easier time getting yourself there. This might be done by standing in front of your vision board. Maybe you’ve got some picture of things that represent things that you want to achieve in your life, or things you want to bring into your life, or successes that you want to have. You can stand there and study those and try to get those into your mind. Try to see them in your mind.

You could also just sit silently with your eyes closed and picture what you want your life to be like. See if you can get yourself to feel what it’s going to be like when you are there and that will really help you to internalize that, and to accept that as the reality that you want to achieve.

Exercise

The fourth part is Exercise. This can take on different forms. Maybe you go out for a run. Maybe you go out for a bike ride. Maybe you rearrange the cans in your food storage room, those big heavy cans, moving them, lifting them around. Or big buckets of cement. You can be creative. Maybe go outside and do some pull ups on the swing set, or just jump up and down. A lot of times we get up, go into the office and sit in a chair all day, and we don’t move a lot. We’re just sitting there–all day. If we can get ourselves moving, that’s going to help our bodies to function a lot better. And our minds as well.

Reading

The fifth part is Read. Pick up a book. Learn something. This could be your scriptures. Or a novel, where you could really get into the story and. Or, it could be something that you want to learn, through some educational book. The idea is that we want to always be exercising that part of our brain. We’re reading words, and we’re learning new things.

Scribe

The final piece of SAVERS is Scribe. This is writing. He calls it Scribe because that makes the acronym flow. What would it be if he used the word Writing instead? SAVERW??? Scribe sounds better. It makes the acronym work better–so we have SAVERS. Scribe then. We all have negative feelings and emotions inside of us, and if we let them sit there, eventually they’re going to bottle up and they’re going to come out and be spewed out all over other people. We don’t want that. We want to be proactive and get ahead of that.

So what we do is, maybe every other day, during your scribe time, your writing time, is you sit down and write all the things that are troubling you or bothering you. Write about your frustrations. Write about the sadness you’ve experienced in your life. Write about any disappointment and anger you’ve felt. Write that on paper, and then tear it up and throw it in the garbage.

If you do that every other day then maybe on the even days what you do is you write about gratitude, or things that you are grateful for. Maybe you have a gratitude journal where you write and record these things. You can write in there “I’m grateful for this, I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful for my family,” and on and on. This will help you to appreciate those things more.

The Quick Version

Those are the six pieces of the SAVERS morning routine. What’s really great about this is that you can do a super simple, abbreviated version. What I like to do is to set a timer for one minute and spend just a single minute on each part. This then becomes the six minute version.

I’ll set a timer for one minute on my phone and I’ll sit there and I’ll just be silent for one minute. When the alarm goes off I reset it and I switch over to my affirmations. I have a list of affirmations on my phone that I like to read and I’ll read through those until the timer goes off again. Then I’ll switch over to some visualization. When the timer goes off again I switch over to exercise. Maybe I’ll do some push ups or planks, or some stretching, or whatever, for one minute. Then next is reading. So I will pull out a book and I’ll read for one minute. And then the last thing is scribe. I’ll write down quickly, “These things are bothering me.” Or “I’m grateful for this.” And after six minutes, BOOM!, I’m done.

Now it’s Your Turn!

It’s amazing! Even just doing it for six minutes makes you feel so empowered, and so ready to go. It gives you that boost you need in the morning. Of course if you do it for longer and spend more time on these different things, you’ll get more benefit from it. But before investing more time into it, just try it out at an easy level. You’ll see that even just doing the quick version is going to make a big impact on your life.

When I Found Myself Stuck

Let me relate this to a story of a time when I got stuck. My story is about being physically stuck, but I think you will see that it applies to being stuck in life, in your thoughts. and in your brain. So, years ago when I was younger, I was travelling in a car on this dirt road with a friend. We were out kind of exploring this area we were unfamiliar with and it had just recently rained. Here we were cruising along, and as we passed by some interesting things we stopped to take some pictures. Like for example, we saw this old abandoned house, well, a shack I guess, and it was made of cinderblocks and there was some old metal corrugated roofing lying nearby.

Well, we continued on a little bit past this point and decided that the road wasn’t going anywhere, so we decided to turn around and head back. As we were coming back, we started heading up this hill that was probably 100 feet long, and we didn’t get but 20 feet up and our tires started spinning. They were filled with dirt and mud! It was wet, like I mentioned, and the car just slid back down the hill. It was very clear, very quickly, that we weren’t going to be getting up the hill this way. We tried again and again and we couldn’t get past this certain point. We were stuck!

So, there we were at the bottom of this hill and we were stuck. Does this sound familiar? This might be how you’re feeling in life, when you are, what you might call, stuck. You are trying to move forward and you want to move forward but for whatever reason the wheels just spin and you’re not able to get any momentum or any traction to move forward in your life. And this was the same situation that we were in.

How to Get Yourself Unstuck

I’ll come back to the story in a little bit, but first I want to share with you four suggestions that I have to help. Maybe these are things that you can try that will help you to get unstuck and to get yourself moving forward.

My first suggestion to you is to find some support. There’s probably people around you that are not stuck and who would be willing to offer you some help, to give you some advice, or to give you some direction. Maybe they would even hold your hand and help you get started and be supportive as you get going. Support may also come in the form of someone else who is stuck like you are, who also wants to get unstuck. This is someone you can bounce some ideas off of and that, together, you can work on finding some solutions and getting both of yourselves to move forward. 

My next suggestion for you is to change something. Find something new or different that you can do. If you’re continuing to do the same things that you’ve been doing in the past, then you’re going to get the same results you’ve been getting in the past. In order for things to change in your life, you’re going to have to make some changes. So you need to find something that you can do differently and then you can start to expect that you’ll have different results. 

My third suggestion to you is to find a way to gain some momentum, to get some small victories that will help to give you that momentum. I suggest that you have a morning routine. Something that you consistently do as you wake up each morning. Identify a few things that you can do that are pretty simple, that you can just knock out pretty easily, that will help you to get some small victories. It could be as simple as just making your bed. Start the day off with a victory and as you do that you’ll teach yourself “Hey, I’m the kind of person that wins. I’m the kind of person that gets things done.” That will lead to other, bigger things that you can get done. It will get you the momentum that you’re looking for that will help you to move along.

My fourth and final suggestion for you is to pray for guidance and inspiration and then go about your day and keep your eyes open. Be aware of things going on around you and expect to find that something is going to come your way. There’s going to be an opportunity or an idea that comes to you, or something like that. Or perhaps there will be someone that will cross your path, that will help to guide you and give you some better direction in your life, that will help you to get yourself unstuck, and that will lead you to getting whatever idea that you need to get yourself moving forward.  

A Quick Review

So those are my four suggestions for you. Let me do a quick recap of what those are. The first one is support. Find some support, someone who can help you, someone who can encourage you. The second thing is to change something. Do something different than what you’ve been doing. The third thing is to get some momentum. Start with some small victories. Implement a morning routine. And the final suggestion is to pray for guidance and inspiration. 

The Happy Ending — Stuck No Longer! 

Okay, so now back to my story, and hopefully you’ll see how some of these things, these suggestions that I mentioned, played out in my story and in us getting back to the top of the hill. So we sat there and we realized we were stuck. We knew that just sitting there wasn’t going to help get us out of the situation. So, we remembered the old building up at the top of the hill, and the roofing material. We went up there and we grabbed some of that old metal roofing. We thought if we could lay that on the track then maybe that would help us give the wheels something to grab onto and move up. Unfortunately, it didn’t work like we had hoped. 

The next thought was something similar. We thought “Oh, maybe we can gather some rocks and stick them there in the dirt and that would help us get moving.” So we packed down some rocks on the trail and again the car got a little bit of traction on those rocks, but it wasn’t enough to get going up the hill. 

So, finally, as the sun’s getting lower in the sky, we were getting more concerned about getting back before it got dark on us. We decided to pray again, and as we got up off our knees from saying the prayer, I remembered something from my high school days, in a physics class. It was something about friction being different depending on whether you’re pushing or pulling.

I had the thought “What if we turn the car around and drive it up backwards?” So my friend jumped in the car, spun the thing around and gave it gas. He started going up the hill and he was actually making progress, inching his way up the hill. So there I was running alongside him cheering for him saying, “Go, go, go, go!,” Trying to encourage him and the car to give it their all and to get up the hill. Well…we got up the hill! We survived, which is why I am here today. We survived! We celebrated at the top of the hill and we were excited to have overcome this challenge and to get unstuck, to be able to keep moving forward with our day and with our plans.

I want you to look at these suggestions that I’ve given you here. I want you to consider if you might find value in implementing one of them, or more of them in your life. Give it a try. See if it’s what you need to help yourself to get unstuck and get moving forward in your life again. You can do it!