The day you stop chasing is the day everything you need begins chasing you.
If you know 7 Good Minutes and the calm voice of Clyde Lee Dennis, you know the kind of start that changes the day. In this piece I’ll walk you through why you don’t have to chase the day and how a quieter, more intentional approach is a cornerstone of self-mastery. Watching or listening to the original short episode from 7 Good Minutes will give you that immediate lift, but this article will expand the thinking into a practical, step-by-step guide so you can put the message into practice every morning. self-mastery is not an abstract ideal—it’s a set of small, repeatable choices you can make as soon as you open your eyes.
Attention: Why Most Mornings Feel Like a Chase
You wake up and already feel behind. Your mind is running the day’s to-do list before your feet hit the floor. That feeling of scarcity—never enough hours, never enough energy—is the mental state that turns every morning into a chase. When you operate from that stance, time becomes the enemy and urgency becomes the default. This is the exact scenario that stands between you and steady progress toward self-mastery.
Chasing the day often looks like: sprinting from notification to notification, multitasking through breakfast, starting meetings still mentally in bed, and trying to do your most important thinking under pressure. It’s not efficient. It’s exhausting. And it’s unnecessary. The invitation here is simple: stop racing, start receiving. That shift is the beginning of self-mastery.
Interest: What Happens When You Stop Chasing
Imagine a morning where you show up to your life with presence instead of panic. You don’t need to sprint to prove your worth. You don’t have to micromanage every minute. You meet the day instead of hunt it. This is not passive surrender—this is engagement from a grounded place. In practice, it looks like breathing first, noticing what’s here, and making decisions with intention.
When you stop chasing, several things change:
- Your energy is used more wisely. You begin to align tasks with your natural peaks and valleys instead of forcing productivity on demand.
- Your clarity improves. Without frantic motion, insight and creative solutions have space to appear.
- Your decisions become sustainable. You choose moves that feel like progress, not reactions to anxiety.
- Your relationships calm. When you are present, conversations are better and stress doesn’t spill over onto others.
These outcomes are the foundation of self-mastery. They’re not about doing more; they’re about doing what matters from a place of inner steadiness.
Desire: Why You’ll Want to Live This Way
There’s an appeal to the chase: it promises speed, results, recognition. But the chase tends to deliver short-lived wins and long-term fatigue. Receiving the day—welcoming it—promises something deeper: sustainable progress, clearer priorities, and the quiet joy of being in alignment with your life. That’s the kind of result that quietly fuels self-mastery.
When you learn to collaborate with the day, you’ll notice that what you need is often already present. Clarity arrives when you slow down. Solutions show up when you create space. The day, in a sense, begins to chase you because you are no longer exhausted from the hunt—you are available to receive. That availability is what self-mastery feels like.
Action: How to Stop Chasing and Start Receiving—A Practical Blueprint
Here’s a step-by-step morning blueprint you can start using immediately. Each step is designed to help you move from frantic reaction to calm engagement. Practice these consistently and you will see measurable changes in focus, mood, and productivity. These steps are practical training in self-mastery.
1. The First Minute: Breathe and Orient
Before you check your phone, take one full, conscious minute to breathe. Close your eyes if it helps. Inhale for four counts, hold for two, exhale for six. Repeat this cycle four times. This small ritual signals to your nervous system that you are present and not being hurried by every ping and alert. It’s the first exercise in self-mastery—choosing presence.
2. The Second Minute: One Question
Ask yourself one simple question: “How can I honor this day?” Not how can you conquer, not how you can finish, but how you can honor what’s present. The word honor opens you to partnership with your day rather than competition with it. Your answer doesn’t need to be elaborate. A single phrase—“be kind to myself,” “make progress on Project X,” “listen fully in meetings”—is enough to set an intention.
3. The Third Minute: Energy Mapping
Spend a minute thinking about how your energy tends to flow. Are you sharper in the morning or afternoon? What times of day are better for deep work vs. busywork? Mapping your energy is an essential skill of self-mastery. Once you know your rhythms, you can schedule tasks to match them instead of trying to force focus at the wrong time.
4. The First Hour: A Gentle Framework
Use the first hour to establish momentum without crashing into chaos. A simple structure might look like this:
- 0–10 minutes: Breathe and set intention (see steps above)
- 10–30 minutes: Light movement (stretching, a short walk, gentle yoga)
- 30–60 minutes: Single-focus work on your most meaningful task
By protecting this hour you create an anchor of calm productivity. Each morning you train yourself in self-mastery by prioritizing what matters before reactive tasks take over.
5. Micro-Rituals to Keep Throughout the Day
Once you’ve set the tone, reinforce it with micro-rituals:
- Take three mindful breaths before every meeting.
- Pause for 60 seconds between tasks to orient and choose your next action intentionally.
- Schedule a mid-day reset—ten minutes away from screens to breathe, stretch, and re-align.
These tiny breaks prevent the momentum of chasing from creeping back in. They’re small acts of self-mastery you can practice anywhere.
Tools and Practices That Support This Shift
Self-mastery is built with tools and habits that you can practice daily. Here are practical supports to help you stop chasing your day and start receiving it.
Mindfulness and Breathwork
Daily mindfulness trains your capacity to be present. Start with five minutes a day and build slowly. Breathwork, as described earlier, is the most portable technique: use it in the morning, before meetings, or whenever you feel the chase creeping back in.
Journaling Prompts for Clarity
Use short, focused journaling prompts in the morning to clarify your intention and invite the day in:
- What one thing would make today progress meaningful?
- Where do I want to show up with patience instead of haste?
- What’s the smallest action I can take that moves this forward?
Journaling is a direct pathway to the kind of insight that shows up only when you slow down. This insight is a pillar of self-mastery.
Boundaries and Time Design
Choose when you are available. Protect your first hour. Put a short block of “deep work” on your calendar and treat it as non-negotiable. Boundaries are the practical scaffolding that allow calm to flourish. They are essential tools for anyone practicing self-mastery.
Reflective Evening Routine
The way you end your day influences how the next morning begins. Spend five minutes each evening reflecting on one question: “Where did I chase today, and where did I receive?” This reflection is training. Over time you’ll see patterns and learn to course-correct so that each morning becomes less of a sprint and more of a dance.
Real-Life Scenes: How This Looks in Practice
Let’s picture three brief morning scenarios so you can see how the shift from chase to receive plays out.
Scene 1: The Manager
You lead a team and mornings used to be a barrage of triage emails. Now you guard the first 60 minutes. You breathe, set intention, do 30 minutes of focused planning for the team’s priorities, and then open email. The result: fewer reactive decisions, clearer team direction, and less burnout. That’s self-mastery in leadership.
Scene 2: The Creative
You used to try to force ideas at any hour. You now align creative work with your peak energy—late morning. You protect that block and use the early hour to move slowly: coffee, breathing, a short walk. When you sit down to create, ideas come more easily. Your output improves because you create conditions for inspiration rather than chasing it. That’s self-mastery in craft.
Scene 3: The Parent Balancing Home and Work
Chaos in the morning was the norm—until you built a simple ritual. You and your family take five minutes of quiet breathing before the day starts. You set one intention for your workday and one for your family time. You notice when you rush and gently come back to breath. This steadier presence makes you a calmer parent and a more focused professional. That is practical self-mastery.
Common Obstacles and How to Overcome Them
The idea of slowing down can feel impossible when life is busy. Here are common objections and simple ways to move past them.
“I don’t have time to slow down.”
You do have time—you just need to invest it differently. The one minute of breath costs you nothing and yields clarity. Protecting a 60-minute anchor at the start of the day rearranges your whole rhythm and saves time downstream. The small investment produces exponential returns in calm and productivity—this is the pragmatic side of self-mastery.
“I get distracted by urgent things.”
Urgency often masquerades as importance. Use a simple triage rule: urgent and important gets immediate attention; important but not urgent gets scheduled into your energy-aligned blocks; everything else is delegated or deleted. Create a short checklist and follow it. The checklist is a tool to return you to self-mastery when distractors appear.
“I worry I’ll lose momentum.”
Momentum built in a frantic way is fragile. Momentum built from aligned, intentional action is durable. Instead of a momentum sprint, cultivate a rhythm. Small, consistent actions add up. That durability is a hallmark of self-mastery.
Practical Prompts and Exercises You Can Try Today
Here are short, actionable exercises you can implement immediately. They’re designed to train your nervous system and your habits toward receiving the day.
- First-Minute Breath: Upon waking, take four cycles of 4–2–6 breathing.
- Three-Word Intention: Summarize your focus for the day in three words and repeat them aloud.
- Energy Block: Schedule a 90-minute block for your highest-priority work aligned with your peak energy.
- No-Phone Start: Delay phone use for the first 60 minutes.
- Midday Reset: At lunch, step outside for five minutes and breathe with awareness.
- Evening Reflection: Journal for five minutes about where you received the day and where you chased it.
Each of these practices is a training module in self-mastery. Integrated over weeks, they rewire how you meet your days.
How This Approach Connects to Broader Growth
The shift from chasing to receiving is about more than productivity—it’s about character. When you practice presence, you build discipline that isn’t punitive. You learn to choose rather than react. That’s essential for any long-term personal development work and for the deeper projects of life: relationships, leadership, creativity, and inner peace.
Self-mastery isn’t about perfection. It’s about steady progress. Each time you choose to breathe instead of sprint, you strengthen your capacity to show up for what matters. You are training a muscle: the muscle of being present under pressure, kind to yourself, and responsive rather than reactive. Over time, those small choices compound into a life that feels more meaningful and more manageable.
Resources and Next Steps
If you want a daily reminder to practice this approach, consider using a short guided resource each morning—an audio or a short podcast clip that helps you begin with breath and intention. Join a community that practices these micro-habits together. Commit to one week of no-phone starts and see how your clarity shifts. These are simple next steps that support your journey toward self-mastery.
Closing—An Invitation
You don’t have to chase the day. The day is not an opponent to catch. It’s a partner to engage. By choosing small, repeatable rituals you build a life of intention. Begin each morning with breath. Ask the question: “How can I honor this day?” Protect your anchor hour. Choose tasks that match your energy. Practice short pauses throughout the day. Reflect in the evening.
These are not dramatic changes, but they are powerful. They are the steady scaffolding of self-mastery: small decisions repeated daily until they become the way you live. Try them for a week and notice what changes. When you stop chasing and start receiving, you’ll discover that everything you need often waits for you in the space you create to meet it.
Be kind to yourself as you practice. Progress is incremental. Trust that the day is on your side and that cultivating presence is one of the most effective investments you can make in your life and work. In the words I began with: the day you stop chasing is the day everything you need begins chasing you.
If this resonated, consider supporting the practice: rate and review a favorite daily resource, join a learning community that focuses on life skills, or simply share this approach with someone who needs a calmer morning. Let’s continue the work of becoming more present, more intentional, and more capable of self-mastery—one morning at a time. And as always, let’s be civil to one another out there.
View the full video here: You Don't Have to Chase the Day