The sky is still blue… even behind the rain clouds. There’s not much traffic on the roads and that means you can hear the birds singing. There are fewer people about and that's why the streets don’t have much litter.
All good. But…
At Friday night’s press briefing BoJo gave a peculiar performance. Like a teenager who’s scrapped mum’s car, he was trying to tell us something but couldn’t quite bring himself to say. Say what?
Let’s do it for him; the variants are running wild, we don’t have enough vaccines, has no idea when lockdown will end and can’t fathom a way out of all this? Summer is starting to look like it is out of reach.
It is what it is, we are where we are …
… and it’s Monday and I can hear a collective sigh as the nation gets in step for another week.
It’s a week, like a lot of other weeks. Home is a school, a care-home, an office, a teleconference suite, a cinema, a workshop, a cafe, a restaurant, a creche, a football-pitch and a war zone!
Some brave souls will be travelling to work. They define themselves. They’ll be the people we rely on, depend on and can’t do without.
On the one hand, routine is good, it’s part of resilience, on the other… it does something to yer brain-box.
We need a bit of magic…
Essentially keeping going all boils down to ‘people’ and how we look out for people and each other. It’s more difficult right now as we don’t see people like we used to.
Make a list of the people in your life, call it My-A-List.
Who is on your ‘A-List'? Family, friends, team, people you work, with, neighbours.
Make a list and make them the people you are going to send a note. The people you are going to call, a kind word and ‘how are you doing’.
Start Monday, with the people you'd want to be with. The ones, in different times, you’d hang-out with. You can still do it and right now, it is even more important. You can still have a coffee, a chat, a quiet word. FaceTime is free, an investment and time well spent.
Put some ambition into Monday.
Set some goals for yourself, your career, family, relationships. Goals are good, targets are pointless. Losing weight, exercising, reading a book, learning and expanding, catching up and clearing out. Use Mondays as a benchmark to see how far you’ve come. Use Mondays to be proud of yourself.
Monday is the day to say thank-you.
Show your gratitude. Use Monday as the day to make someone’s week. Ring them and say;
‘I just want to say thank you for what you did last week…’
Be smart on a Monday; use it as the day to initiate a conversation with someone you haven’t spoken to before.
Is it possible in lockdown? True, you’re not going to have a water-fountain-moment, or a car-park-moment but you can message someone you have been in a meeting with and say; ‘I wondered if we can keep in touch, I know nothing about your topic and I’d like to know more’.
In normal times it's called networking.
It takes an effort to do it but think how you’d feel if someone did it to you… I’m guessing, flattered, pleased and willing.
Make Monday a contemplation day.
What did you learn from last week? Don’t sweep last week away. Think about it. Spend a moment, on yourself, thinking.
Think through what worked and what didn’t. What were your strong points. What could you have done better.
You are 100% responsible for your career, your job and the next five days. Take the best of the past week into this.
With all the uncertainty of lock-down, one thing I can promise you, Mondays aren’t going away.
Make them the fulcrum point of the week and if you create My-A-List, are Ambitious, remember how important Gratitude is, Initiate some new conversations and Contemplate the good bits you want to keep doing, you will have an M, an A, a G, an I and a C and with a bit of luck...
I'm hearing - Doctors working overtime against Covid hit by hefty tax bills. Higher pension contributions after taking on extra shifts could incur tax penalties.
>> I'm hearing - Half a million fewer vaccines being supplied to NHS next week. Government sources admit the target of vaccinating priority groups by mid-February was increasingly 'tight'... tight is good enough!
