Hal Elrod has been through a lot in his lifetime. In 1999, at age 20, he was hit by a drunk driver and found dead at the scene. He stopped breathing, and for six minutes, his heart didn’t beat. Despite 11 broken bones and permanent brain damage, he was miraculously revived. When he woke up from a coma six days later, he was told that he would never walk again.
Yet, Elrod defied the odds and walked three weeks later. In 2012, he created his Miracle routine, which evolved into a book, a documentary, an app and an online community.
While filming the documentary, at age 37, he was diagnosed with a cancer that has a very low survival rate. Elrod continued his documentary while going through treatment. His cancer is in remission.
We’ve put together a roundup of Elrod’s offerings so you can begin your own Miracle Morning.
The Book: The Miracle Morning
Elrod created The Miracle Morning: (Updated and Expanded Edition): The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM) to get through some of the hardest days of his life, but he never planned for it to be a book.
“It was never a book idea. It was my own desperate attempt to turn my life around when I was struggling,” Elrod says. “Financially, I was at the lowest point in my life. Mentally and emotionally, I was at the lowest point in my life. When I started this morning ritual, I just kind of combined the best practices that I could find into one ritual.”
Then, his ritual turned into a book: The Miracle Morning. The first edition—which sold over 2 million copies and was translated into 37 languages—has spun off into a series, with books written for a variety of audiences, including (but not limited to) salespeople, parents, entrepreneurs and those in addiction recovery. The book outlines Elrod’s six-step morning ritual called SAVERS (Silence, Affirmations, Visualization, Exercise, Reading, Scribing) that he created in 2008 during the Great Recession.
The “updated and expanded edition” of Elrod’s book came out Dec. 12, 2023—nearly 11 years since the first edition’s 2012 debut. The updated edition includes more than 70 new pages of content, including two new chapters titled “The Miracle Evening” and “The Miracle Life.”
The Documentary: The Miracle Morning (2020)
Director Nick Conedera convinced an originally skeptical Elrod to do a film about the Miracle Morning practice. Elrod was concerned about the time constraints of making a movie; Conedera felt that the story needed to be told visually for an audience that doesn’t read self-help books. Finally, after months of check-ins, Elrod agreed.
In 2016, Elrod was halfway into filming The Miracle Morning documentary when he was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive cancer: acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Given only a 20-30% chance of surviving, Elrod told Conedera that the movie needed to be placed on hold.
Instead, Conedera convinced Elrod to continue filming through his cancer treatments to show his ability to overcome the diagnosis.
“We weren’t planning on filming the cancer journey,” says Elrod, who’s now in remission. “But when you watch the movie, you’ll see: Thank God we did. The last 30 minutes of the movie are me trying to beat cancer while I’m still speaking and sharing the message, and The Miracle Morning community is rallying behind me. That really made the movie much more than it would have been without that experience.”
The Podcast: Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod
The Achieve Your Goals podcast offers weekly “practical advice and strategies to achieve your goals and dreams,” according to its Apple Podcasts description. Most episodes feature a guest. Past guests have included: Michael Breus, Ph.D., (aka “the Sleep Doctor”) and Shawn Stevenson (The Model Health Show podcast and Eat Smarter Family Cookbook: 100 Delicious Recipes to Transform Your Health, Fitness and Connection).
The App: The Miracle Morning
If you’re working to incorporate The Miracle Morning into your routine, there’s now an app for that, too. The Miracle Morning app visually takes users through the SAVERS steps and features helpful content that aids in their process.
The app contains hundreds of personalized morning routines, and users can complete all six steps of the process in as little as six minutes.
The app has both free and paid versions available.
The Miracle Morning also has a thriving Facebook group, which had more than 360,000 members at the time of publication. In this group, members often share their own journeys of using the SAVERS method to change their lives. Elrod says that some of the updates for his book were inspired by the community and its members.
“I’m engaging in there,” Elrod says. “I’m learning not only from my own practice but from what other people are doing.”
The School Program: The Miracle Morning in Schools
The Miracle Morning program for schools offers self-guided, virtual and in-person wellness training for faculty. According to its website, the mission is “to equip schools with resources to bring The Miracle Morning into their communities with practices that invite mindful living, set future intention and encourage conscious action for today’s scholars, teachers, administrators and parents, one school at a time.”
Reviews on the program’s website note that it has been a valuable resource for eliminating teacher burnout and helping educators make deeper connections with their students. Educators also said that teaching the program to students helped improve attendance and behavioral issues in schools.
This article originally appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of SUCCESS magazine. Photo courtesy of Hal Elrod
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