Hi, it’s Bev here, and I love Mondays! Which coincidentally is what we’ve called the Category for these posts. Hands up if you remember the Boomtown Rats🤘🏼They weren’t keen on Mondays. But I love them.
I like the fact that Monday seems like a new beginning.
There’s a freshness to it.
It holds some possibility.
None of that is really true, it’s just how I like to see it. It’s a helpful assumption that enables me to navigate the start of the working week.
But in truth Tuesday is just as much of a fresh start as Monday is. Or I could choose any hour, minute or second of the day and week to be a start.
Yet we make assumptions and choose predictable routes for our thoughts about things, to ease navigation; nothing wrong in that, so long as we’re aware that’s what we’re doing and we don’t give Mondays any more significance than they deserve.
What do you 💚 about Mondays? I choose Cards (as seen in the image for this post) to focus my intention for the week, that’s one of the things I love. You?
Anyway, I’ve been reading Selfless Leadership by Katrijn van Oudheusden this weekend. She writes about non duality. You can see what she thinks about that by taking a look at her on Substack.
Back to the book, where she explores the assumptions that we carry around with us, based on years of innocent conditioning, and offers some insights that could free us from these assumptions.
What I’m zoomed in on 🧐 right now is this one…
We’ve been taught to arm ourselves with strategies to make life a success.
Oh yes, that’s certainly something that looks true to me. Interview strategies, exercise strategies, coping strategies, the list goes on. We often look at other people’s strategies, as a shortcut to success. No wonder people are selling their ‘perfect’ strategies for this, that and the other, to anyone who lingers while they’re scrolling!
The assumption seems to be that if ‘they’ have achieved the success that we also want to achieve, then if we do what they did, we will achieve the same success. But we’re missing something about the uniqueness of our own path in life…
Looking elsewhere for ideas for what’s possible seems OK to me, up to a point. We could consider stopping short of a ‘cut and paste’ of someone else’s unique steps to success, and pause to think for ourselves, and as ourselves.
The path through life is unique; unique to each one of us. Yes, there are overlaps where our paths cross with others, but our own life is unfolding in front of us. We’re not laying the path ourselves. We’re not completely in control of what happens next. We simply have to notice how life unfolding and respond to that.
We can learn a range of approaches that we might deploy as our particular life unfolds and reality emerges. The skill of being a human being is in responding in the moment, thinking clearly enough to draw upon resources, ideas, experiences in the blink of an eye so that we can navigate the path with some degree of ease.
Our response is a special blend, a secret formula that is evolving all the time. Smart tactics borrowed from others won’t meet our exact needs.
And the constant seeking for solutions from someone else is putting us further out of sync with what’s actually happening, and what we truly need to thrive as humans.
It’s all a distraction from where our attention really needs to be, which is deeply aware, and in this moment.
So I offer you two questions as fuel for your week….
1. How do you define success, for yourself? I mean your own standard, not a standard dictated by someone else. What would you be happy with if you didn’t compare yourself to others?
2. And, in her book Katrijn suggests that the path of personal development is a dead end. Given that if you’re reading this you probably have an interest in personal development, what evidence do you have from your own experience that this could be true?
Big questions for a Monday, right? What do you think? Grab a thinking partner, a journal or a voice recorder and see what answers come up for you in response to those questions.
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In other news, we’re developing some additional resources to sit alongside Think Like A Leader. We’ll let you know when they are accessible! Here’s an example, to help Leaders think about how to make these expectations visible and agreed,
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And next Monday at 3.45pm it’s Card School #32 and we are looking at using the Cards for showing appreciation to other people. Join us using this link.
Please do recommend it to people you know who may get something from it. We can send out sample cards to people who don’t have their own set (until they see what they’re missing out on 😉)
Back next week with more.
Create a brilliant week, Bev x
P.S. I’m going to be ready to run Thinking Partner courses from September onwards so if you think you or people you know might be ready for a first formal foray into the Thinking Environment, please do let me know.
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