Leading With Authenticity

Happy Monday, everybody. I hope you're having the best Monday. My name is Jean Mitchells. I'm gonna hold some space for people to pop on in today thinking about Monday Madness or Monday Magic. Good morning, Leslie. Happy Monday. As we chime in and dial into the channel here today, I'm going to invite everyone to choose a word. Would you call today Monday Madness? Or would you call today Monday Magic? Thank you. So I'm calling Today Monday Magic. I have my matcha latte at my favorite little local coffee shop with Major, the resident assistant to Cadre.

So today as we come on in, I am intentionally choosing the words magic or madness because it's all about perspective. And I'm gonna talk about perspective first, and then we're gonna talk about passion and purpose today. So intention Mondays, we have the opportunity to choose how we leap out of bed. And saying leap intentionally again. Because Mondays sometimes for me, are really hard. I work a lot on the weekends. I do sound baths. I teach a lot of spin classes. I've been training for a marathon.

And Mondays are typically my day off from most of those other activities. I still have my day job, but Mondays, I oftentimes will not set an alarm and wake up when I wake up. My day job is flexible enough that I intentionally don't set any meetings until after this Cadre call so that I have that time to rest if I need to rest. But if I bound out of bed and I'm up early, then it's go time. So today was a day of rest, but I'm considering today a day of magic because I look ahead at my day and it's a day of preparation for a trip that I'm leaving on tomorrow.

It's a day for me to get done some really cool things for my client work, and I'm really excited about them. And I just decided that today, that day, choosing that mindset or perspective will help me have the right mindset to be able to approach my day. Good morning. Welcome. So if you're calling in or listening in on replay, today, on Monday, or any day of the week, I'm inviting everyone to type in the chat. Is today Monday Madness or is today Monday Magic? You can pick one. So when I say madness, sometimes those are the days where you wake up on Monday and your phone starts blowing up right away, your emails start blowing up right away, your chats at work start blowing up, and you find that you get into that state of chaos.

Monday Magic is that day where maybe the chaos still happens, but you approach it with A sense of grace and calm and stability. Or maybe this morning you gave yourself some grace to take a pause before diving into all of the storm and approach it a little more methodically or with a little more intention. I shared that today is Monday Magic for me. I have a very long list of things to get done today, but I'm choosing today to approach all of them with a little bit more compassion for myself and a little bit more joy.

Why is that important? Whether or not you manage a team of people or you're an employee or you work on your own and have your own business, how you choose to start your Mondays can be a tipping point. One direction or the other for the day doesn't mean it's going to set the tone for your whole week. Every day we have a new opportunity to reset and restore and choose how we want to approach things. It's literally just for today. So when you think about that, setting that tone for today and all the people that you're going to connect with today, if you approach it from a magic mindset, your interactions might veer one direction.

If you choose the madness or chaos element, your day and interactions might go somewhere different. Good morning, Jules. I'm inviting everyone when they dial in today to type in. Is today Monday Magic or Monday Madness? Now for me, when I think about the people that I get to work with, I have a client base that I work with and I have a team at our spin studio, instructors, managers. And on Mondays, I know that our general manager at the studio has a day off. And so I actually schedule messages to go to her on Tuesdays because I've learned that if I start firing with all of the ideas that I have.

Oh, thank you, Jules. Monday Magic. If I start firing with all of the ideas that I have of things that I know that need to get done this week, she will inevitably have her notifications on her Slack channel, on her phone, and she will log in and start responding to me. And my job is to help protect that time for her, just like she protects time for me and for the rest of us on the team. And so being able to have that mindset where if I'm in a Monday Madness day, I'm probably not even considering that she has the day off.

And I'm sending her all kinds of messages on Slack now. She's also a good friend of mine, so I could easily pop into text and send her text too. So it's really drawing that fine line to create that balance. But if I need boundaries to have my time Protected, then I need to do the same for the team. So understanding what perspective we're starting off with on a Monday can really help us set the tone for how we do what comes next in our days. Let me know your thoughts. Now, that doesn't mean the entire day is going to go smoothly.

It doesn't even mean that the entire day you're going to be able to have that intention. But what it does mean is moment by moment, we get that choice. Interaction by interaction, we get that choice. We can feel in our bodies when we're starting to become overwhelmed. Most of the time our breath will shorten, our jaw will clench, our fists might clench, our heart might start to beat really fast. So physiologically we cannot disassociate from the madness, the magic. When I'm in a place of magic, I can feel my body calm.

Just those two words, keeping it really simple can be just enough to trigger my mindset. My breath is slower. I might speak a little bit slower. Now, sometimes I talk fast. And that's not because of madness. It's because of the other topic for today, fashion. So doing that check in will be really important. And my invitation to you is if you do work with a team of people, Good morning, Speak Wonder. If you do work with a team of people, how might you ask them the question, is today Monday madness or Monday magic?

If you're leading a team of people and someone on your team says madness, what might you do to help create calm so that their madness can turn to magic or their madness can just become a little bit smaller? So just putting that out there for consideration. Coffee and writing time. I love it. Speak wonder. So my second area of focus for today, that major would like to introduce how to do that one for you. Speak Wonder is passion and purpose. Now, why am I blending that with perspectives on Monday?

Because I firmly believe that there are days that we're going to wake up and we're going to just check the boxes. Sometimes those are our madness days. Some days, those are days that we just don't have control. Just trying to steal my donut major down. Good boy. So passion and purpose. Now, I have gotten into a lot of conversations over my career and my adult life because I firmly believe, remember, Rosie Glass is here and I'm a coach. I'm a strengths based coach. And strengths based coaching is all around positive psychology, appreciative inquiry.

So when I think about passion and purpose, I believe that if we don't have passion for the work that we do, if we aren't Inspired by the work that we do, we will not be the most effective. It does not mean that we can't get the job done. We can do anything we put our mind to. However, when I'm working with clients and even choosing work for myself, I can understand that if it's a project that I'm choosing to do that maybe I just need to do because I need the work right now, that it might not be the most soul fulfilling work, but it's work that I'm really talented at, then I might find other things outside of work to lean into a little bit more.

So that at least throughout my weeks, I can feel like I have purpose and that my passion can come to life through that purpose. So my passion is about helping to create positive change. So any work that I do, whether I'm coaching clients, teaching a spin class, leading a sound bath, meditation, designing a business strategy, it's really important to me that I'm working with people who want to also create positive change. Now here's the fact. I've been doing consulting work and coaching work on my own for over 15 years.

And in that 15 year period of time, I've done a really great job of vetting clients and choosing work. That's not to say I haven't chosen some projects that I didn't really like the work that much. But what I did find passion with is the leaders who are leading the work. Because they were enough to inspire me that I knew that whatever the task was they needed me to do, I could do it really well for them. But what I also got to do was support the mission of positive change for those leaders. So I made some intentional choices.

But there was one time I didn't listen to my gut and I chose to do the work for what was my passion. But what I missed was it wasn't the leader's passion. So after a couple of months of doing this particular work and this particular project, I actually had to walk away from the clients and walk away from the work. I set them off for success. I made sure they had all the tools and resources they needed. And I even found a backup consultant that if they wanted to bring somebody else in, they could.

Because I couldn't support their values and how they approached the work and how they approached the people that they employed. It was a very big, huge conflict for me. And it deflated. Deflated, sorry, deflated my passion and it stripped away my purpose. So all of those things were in conflict for me. Now, I've had many, many conversations with people in family and friend groups and work groups that think, wow, Jean, you're really lucky to be able to choose work that way, because I don't get to do that.

I have to do this job to make money and do these things. And I'm not even taking that away. That is a very real fact for many, many people. And I do feel very lucky that I've had that mindset, I've had that passion, and I put that intention out there into the world, and I've attracted that work. But even every single day, you have the opportunity to decide what are you passionate about? And how might we plant the seeds to create more work, more opportunities. Opportunities for us to do work that will motivate us, inspire us, engage us, because we are working to our strengths.

When we lean into that core strengths of ours and we can identify the work that positively engages us, when we can find the work that we can find purpose in that matters to us, we will be more engaged, more effective, and more successful. I am happy to have this conversation more and dive a little bit deeper into that. Or I will also post an article a little later today or a video. I'll find which one feels the best, and I'll post that in the comments under leadership so that we can have a conversation about it as well.

But I'm going to leave you with this question today. As you approach your day, either madness day or magic day, and you approach your work, how do you feel? Do you feel engaged with the work? Even if it's a storm, you can still feel excited, engaged. Do you feel drained, energetically drained by the work? How do you feel? And that sounds like a very squishy comment or very squishy, empathetic question. But realistically, we cannot disassociate our physical feelings in our bodies with the things that we're thinking, the things that we're doing.

And when we can be really intentional and we can lean into our passion and purpose through our work, people will experience us very differently. So type in the chat what questions you have. Type in the chat what conversations or questions that you have. I always pop back into the channel, the live streams later in the day to read through the comments and we'll always, always answer any questions that you have. This is a very huge topic and I kind of just threw it out there at you, and I'd love to hear more from you.

But mostly, if you're having a madness day, please lean into it, get juicy with it, and always remember, you can sit inside the storm and watch the swirl and then choose what you do next with it. And if you're having a magic day, spread that. Spread that with others, because many people around you might be inside the storm. I hope you have a great day. I'll be tuning back in on Sunday, and I'm going to have to watch my calendar really closely because I'll be dialing in next Sunday and Monday from Tokyo.

Hope you're having a great day. We'll talk to you all soon. Major says, have a winning day.