Are You Ready?55number of their students had excelled on a test that identified
them as students who would likely exceed expectations and
“bloom” that year. In reality, those students scored average,
compared to their classmates.
Yet in a follow- up review a year later, those exact students
outperformed their peers by ten to fifteen IQ points. The sole
indicator was that the teachers expected them to perform bet-
ter; they mentally labeled them as superior, and those students
rose to that label.^3 Labels are powerful.
It’s important, therefore, to recognize the labels we give
ourselves. When we say, “Well, I’d like to have a morning
routine, but I’m just not a morning person,” we are allowing
our perspective to hold us back. Sure, some people have a
tendency to prefer evenings to morning, and others have a
hard time getting going in the morning. But those simple facts
don’t eliminate the possibility of having a life- giving morning
routine.
Plenty of farmers aren’t morning people, but they still have
to get up, milk the cows, and feed the animals. Not all long-
distance commuters are morning people, but they do what
they have to do to live their lives. Not all parents are morning
people, yet morning after morning they wake up to tend to the
needs of their children.
Maybe you’re living under a label. Maybe at one point
in time, you tried to do “all the things” in the morning
and burned out. You pushed yourself and got out of bed at
the crack of dawn, and you were really proud of your self-
discipline. Your friends told you how impressed they were.
Everything clicked.
But then something happened. You got sick, your alarm