Hello everyone and welcome to Gentle Reminders, a podcast where we accept that not only Dilbert and Garfield get cases of the Mondays but we do too!
I am someone who likes to challenge society’s constructs and honestly, Mondays aren’t that bad. Society has created an illusion that Mondays are a slog, that we should be dreading going back to work.
I struggled with Mondays for years, my whole adult life really, until I looked at the calendar differently. I remember when I looked at my calendar, trying to figure out how to change my mindset and realized… my calendar week, physically, started on Sunday. My actual calendars have always been that way and this blew my mind. I read left to right and this clicked in my brain because Sunday is the beginning, as it is on the left side of my calendar. Maybe that is a child-like way of looking at this but I don’t care. Children are simple and beautiful because of their view on the world and we can all revisit those lenses of child-likeness.
Back to my calendar – By looking at this traditional rest and recover day as the start of my week instead of the end, the script flipped. I had an AHA moment and a door opened. It was like my soul sighed. You know, like you take a big deep breath in then sigh it out. Ahhhhhhh.
Now, my use of this tool ebbs and flows, like life does, and rediscovering it for this episode reignited my desire to use it again and to help you, my lovely listeners, out, I want to describe and share a tool that I’ve found on Pintrest.
If you’d like to see it visually, I’ll walk you through it and link to it in the transcript.
At the top of your page, title it Start of the Week Check-in.
Right under that, write my “#1 priority this week is…”
This starting step is important because finding your focus for the week means you can channel your energy towards reaching that priority.
Now, I’d like to bring up a pet peeve of mine. Priority is singular. Not plural, so you get one item here at the top to focus on. You may find that really difficult at first and I’d like to share one of my favourite quotes from the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown.
“The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluarlize the term and start talking about priorities.” (pg 16)
I find that to be a strong and directive quote that I try to live by. It is simple but that does not mean it is easy.
At the top, you get to pick your one thing. What is going to be your focus? I will keep referring to this Essentialism book, I just adore it. This quote is on Focus:
“When I say focus…I mean creating the space to explore one hundred questions and possibilities.”
And I want to make sure that we capture that final piece. You are already creating the space to explore by using this tool so yay! GO YOU! I’m your cheerleader in all of this.
Alright, moving on to the next item – we’re going to be working in a circle today, so draw a short curved line with an arrow on the end. Under that arrow, write “I want to do less”. In order to truly focus on your priority for the week, you’re going to need to up your level of energy that’s going to your priority. That means you’re going to have to do less of something else. Let’s say the priority for this week is your health. There are a lot of things that you could do less of to focus on your health, depending on what part of your health you’re focusing on. If you’re focusing on your physical health, then maybe you want to do less sitting.
And, of course, following wanting to do less, is wanting to do more. Draw another downward curved line for your circle, the item after this one should match up with the priority. Or you can draw this all linearly, there’s really no rules. It’s more important that you consider the headings. So, you want to do more… sticking with the earlier example, your priority for the week is your physical health and you want to do less sitting. That may mean you want to do more standing or maybe you hit your step goal every day this week. Either way, it’s what you’re expecting to take the place of the item you want to do less of.
Next, we have an important reflection question. “This week I want to feel”. How do you want to feel? There are so many emotions and so many thoughts that come before the emotion. Maybe you want to feel hot this week because you’ve completed a workout. Maybe you want to feel confident and amused. Maybe you want to feel curious, loving or surprised. Now, I’m not saying all of your emotions need to be positive. Let’s flip the script a little on my earlier example. Perhaps you’re grieving a loss. Maybe your priority this week is to sit with that and truly work through it. Maybe the next step is you want less interaction with others and more time to process in private. Maybe you want to feel enraged, frightened, depressed, withdrawn. That’s okay. We all have time that needs to be like this in order to be healthy. Calling it out through this planning process will allow you to give space to those emotions and what you need. Also broadening the range of emotions that you want to feel helps you to discover more accuracy in describing them to others. So how do we make sure we feel this way?
We ask the question HOW? The next heading is: “to feel this way, I will…” Ah, here it is, the action plan. In order to create emotions, experiences need to be had. Think about it. When I ask you about a time you got angry, memories rise up, don’t they? Emotions are pretty tied to experience. In order to focus on your priority, you need to set up the experiences to latch emotions onto. For the physical health example, you want to feel happy, confident and accomplished. To do that you will go to sleep on time. In the grieving example, in order to feel withdrawn from others, I will delete all my social media apps from my phone. Maybe you turn off your phone (after telling a few trusted folks so they don’t worry about you too much) It’s that simple. Honestly, don’t make your action list too big. You want to feel like you got through something this week.
And finally, “If I get stuck, I’ll remember” – this is a great reminder that we all get stuck. We all fall off the proverbial wagon and dive back into rutted habits, that comfort and expectation of the well-known. So, what will you remember if you get stuck? Perhaps on the grieving example, that this feeling is normal and temporary. That grief is different for everyone. On the physical health side, you may want to remember there are many aspects to physical health and you can take care of yourself in more than one way.
To recap, the Start of Week Check-in headings are:
- My priority this week is
- I want to do less
- I want to do more
- This week, I want to feel
- To feel this way, I will
- If I get stuck, I’ll remember
A huge shoutout to @heyamberrae for putting up the graphic on Instagram for creating this graphic!
And that’s your Gentle Reminder today friends. If you want more, I am releasing a podcast every two weeks and if you’d like to get updated when they’re live, I invite you to subscribe on whatever platform you like to listen on.
My next episode will be on patience and until then, give this exercise a try and let me know how it goes! I would love to hear from you on the platform that makes the most sense to you! I’m on Instagram (@gentlereminderspodcast), Twitter (@realGRpodcast) and email at gentlereminderspodcast@gmail.com.
