Relishing life
Welcome to Love Mondays, a weekly newsletter designed as a 3-minute hit to fire up the other 10,077 minutes of your week.
For those taking a break from work today, it might be easier than usual to Love Mondays. We wake up relishing the lack of urgency, the sense that for a moment we don’t need to be troubleshooting, stakeholder managing, plugged in and stressed out. We can just be.
How differently do you feel about a Monday morning, when you’re not ‘at work’?
Write it down.
Consider: what it would be like to wake up every Monday relishing life
Practice: sensing where, in your body and mind, do you feel the positivity pooling
Decide to: create a checklist of feel-good sensations to apply on a different Monday. (I reflected on my dreams, I rolled over and looked at my partner sleeping, I listened to the birds out the window, I took a long, deep breath and felt my belly relax…)
Intrinsic Motivation
When we nail the ‘why’ that gets us out of bed feeling motivated every morning, life and work have more flow. Our energy shifts in the way we show up for ourselves, and for others. Imagine bounding into every meeting with positive intent. Imagine diving into that big project feeling inherently grateful to have a go at changing lives. Imagine waking up every single Monday feeling pumped to be spinning on this planet right now, when there is such an opportunity to make a difference.
Intrinsic motivation is routinely proven to be more powerful than extrinsic reward, particularly when it comes to unleashing creativity and talent. In business, as in life, we too often talk about smashing out a project, killing it at work or destroying the competition. Our aggressive focus on ‘what’ sees us dealing with overloaded inboxes daily, battling ourselves for heightened productivity week-on-week and prioritising the urgent over the important every quarter. In the why-how-what of leadership, the former is the only component of that three-part equation to activate the limbic part of our brains; the motivation centre.
Our ‘why’ is the impact we dream of having. Taking a moment each morning to connect with it means that by the time our feet hit the ground running, we are already grateful to be alive and seizing work with both hands and a full heart.
Thank you to everyone who’s joined our now 18,000+ strong community of Easy Tiger and Love Mondays readers. We appreciate your readership. If you’d like to help us spread the word, why not share Love Mondays with a friend?
Are you feeling excited about 2022? I have an epic leadership challenge kicking off for the month of February. Join a community of like-minded changemakers taking on daily 15 minute challenges to hone our leadership skills. The world needs more epic leadership. Are you up for the challenge?
Love your Mondays