Leading With Authenticity

Good morning, Cadre family. How are we doing today? Jean Mitchells here. I'm back at the studio, dialing in, ready for an exciting Monday. Actually ready for a really great week. Who else is ready for a great week? Dialing in a little early. So I wanted to everybody a little space and time to come on in. But as you enter in today. Hello. Speak, wonder. Happy Monday. Hello, Rick. How you doing today? Coming to you live from psychobar uptown Minneapolis. Hello, Andy. I'm back here again. I'm here a lot.

Good morning. Good morning. As you dial in this morning, I'm going to invite you to just take a deep breath, just one deep breath with me. And if you're listening in on replay, I'll invite you to do the same. I don't know about you, but I feel like Mondays can be a little crazy. We wake up, we have the list of things that we need to accomplish either today or this week. The things that we didn't get done on Friday that we maybe thought about doing Sunday night so we'd be ready on Monday. But, you know, Mondays can be a really hectic time.

Now, I'll share this with you. I worked for a client, so I'm a consultant, and I worked for a client that implemented a policy of no meeting Mondays. And I actually really, really liked that. At first I was like, there's no way this will work, because anytime somebody sees your calendar wide open, somebody inevitably will squeak in that little meeting because it's that urgent. But it took some time, and people still did meet on Mondays because in some organizations, if you work internationally, Monday for me, it could be Tuesday for somebody else.

And so there were exceptions, but people had permission to block off their calendars to have working time. And I really like that because Mondays can be very frenzied, very chaotic, and sometimes we just need a lot of work to get some work done. And if we need to have a dialogue with somebody, we can call them or we can chat with them. So my invitation to you on this Monday is just to come in and breathe, take a hot second, knowing that you are taking this time for you. Fun fact, 45 minutes of a day is only 4% of your day.

So if you do three cadres today, that is only 45, 4% of your day. They're 14, 40 minutes in a day. So I thought I'd just share that with you. So kudos to you for taking a breath and for taking a little bit of time. So I wanted to pop in here again and continue the conversation around the this purpose dialogue. I'm very. I'm gonna pull this in. I'm very passionate about this and feel really inspired to bring this to life a little bit more intentionally. Because I keep hearing a lot of people in job transition, like right now, there are a lot of people who've gone through layoffs and are in job transitions, or they just got really tired of their job and they decided to quit.

And they didn't know what they were going to leap into, but they knew that they weren't happy where they were. And that's a luxury to be able to do that. So having that freedom is quite nice, but also can be a little scary in especially the landscape for today when there are so many layoffs and there is such a significant change in the workplace right now. And so I personally have been listening a lot to people, and I've heard a lot of different things in different workshops, seminars that I've led, or attended, different online forums that I look into.

And people really are looking for something more. They're looking to attach into something with a little more intention. They're really wanting to lean into making an impact. So it seems to be a trend that I'm hearing more today than I heard probably in the last five years. And I've been preaching the same story for a while now. And one of the things I wanted to offer in is how many of you walk around with one of these, a little pocketbook that you can jot notes on. I actually have two. I'm kind of a paper freak.

If I'm in an airport or bookstore and I see a cute little notebook, I may or may not be guilty of acquiring many of them. And then sometimes I think they look so pretty, I don't want to write in them. Or I want to be really specific about what I write because I don't want to waste it because it's too pretty to just put dumb stuff in. I know the things we tell ourselves, right? It's paper. It's paper. There's gonna be another one. But here's what's great. I speak wonder. I had a feeling that you would be writing a lot or probably carry a notebook with you because you write beautiful poetry.

But here's what I've discovered. There are a lot of people that don't carry notebooks around, and that is totally cool. There's zero. Any attachment to that. But what I found is even with the simplicity of typing on our computer or being able to write a note in our iPad or whatever, taking a note on Our phone and our notes pad or application. Our humanness, our brains resonate better with the tactile art of writing. So whether you write well, whether you scribble, whether you draw little pictures that maybe nobody can make sense of but you, there is an art to it.

There is something neuroscience related that tells us that when we physically write in a notebook or physically write on paper, we remember those things more we attach to can ground into our systems a little bit more. So if you aren't a notebook person, if you don't write around, I can't even say the word. This funny. Write a lot. My invitation is to you is to go find a notebook or a notepad. I like notebooks because something like this can fit into like my pocket. And I'm not a big purse or bag person, but if I do have one, they're usually small.

So having something small works really well. And here's why I carry it around. Multiple reasons. And if you carry a notepad around, as I talk about why I do, I would love to know why you carry a notebook around and what you write in it. So for me, I am an ideas person. I could be on a walk with my dog and I could be listening to an audiobook. I could be reading an audiobook or not reading an audiobook, reading a book. It's Monday, but I'll want to jot notes. Or maybe I'm at an event and somebody said something inspiring and I want to capture it.

So a lot of times I'll grab open my notebook and I'm actually flipping this one open. Now I'll jot notes, but a lot of times I do it in a really crazy way. So sometimes I write the wrong way on the page and I draw little graphics. I'm not an artist, so nobody is going to hire me to draw them photos or pictures or do the artwork in a child's book. Nobody will do that. However, what science tells us is when we change up our writing. So even in here, I have circles and I draw lines and it looks messy.

So for people that are a little more clean than I am, my notebooks will feel very messy to you. And that's okay because we're very different people. But what I use in here is I find myself doing is jotting little notes or ideas. Now there are books about sketch art and doodling that are really great books if you are a book person. And when I get back to my home, I'll take a photo of a few of them. But by drawing pictures, a picture resonates or speaks a thousand words, Right? By drawing pictures, it can actually help our brain remember the picture, and then it can attach to the idea or concept that we have in our notebook.

So I find oftentimes I'll also have colored pencils in my bag or markers in my bag that when I write certain things down or create a picture or maybe circle something or use different types of lettering. Like sometimes I'll write big lettering, and I'm trying to see if I did it in this notebook. I have it in my old ones. Sometimes I'll do, like one letter or one phrase or word and like a big capital letter that I make it in a bold way. And when I do that, when I'm thinking about the ideas that I had, I can oftentimes go back to the color that I wrote it in or the picture that I wrote on that notepad or phrase that I put in there.

And I can quickly go find that page and then remember what it was that I was describing and. And I can build on it or I can bring it forward. Sometimes I use a notebook for each of my different types of work that I do. So if it's my consultant work, I might have something here. If it's my. For my crystal healing business or my event business, I might do something different. Haakon, you're out here. Good morning. It's so great to have you. Haakon says that he sometimes journals as a way of breaking the fourth wall to speak to your higher self like a vision of a prayer.

I love that. Or speak wonder. You know, you also carry notebooks around, and it's messy and random, or you collect things in them. Jewels. You do quotes and poems. Sometimes an occasional thought. I would love for you and Speak Wonder to connect and see your poems together, see how different they might be. So there are many different reasons or ways that you can use a notebook and capture thoughts, capture ideas. All those days that you're sitting in meetings. Or maybe Hawken, if you were in my live stream yesterday, Fun fact, Haken was out here.

He was the individual that was doing his first ride at psycho bar. And Andy, you need to come take his class because Haakon's gonna be a star. But this is different ways that we can use notebooks. Sometimes when I'm sitting in meetings, if I actually write the notes of a meeting on paper, I'll write all my questions off to the side because I might not want to interrupt the meeting or the flow of the meeting, but then I can come back to those Questions. Or maybe it's a question I'm asking myself to go explore or investigate.

So I'm going to pull through our conversation from yesterday and I'm going to encourage you, everybody, as they dial in, to go find a notebook of some sort, a pad, a notepad. And over the course of this week, my invitation to you would be to capture your ideas, capture your thoughts, write yourself a poem, write down observations that you have either on these Cadre series or maybe insights that you've collected from a panel speaker or a YouTube video that you watch. So start to capture it and just see what shifts for you as you write, or maybe draw little scribbles.

And again, I'll get you photos of some doodling books that I've learned from that have helped me to rethink how I use paper. But here's also my invitation. Remember yesterday and over the past few weeks, I've been talking about this theory, this concept called ikigai, which is about living with purpose and identifying your purpose. So today I'm going to invite you all and I'll come back into this on replay and I'll type the questions in here as well. So I believe that you'll see that. But my invitation to you is to grab your little notebook and write three questions in here.

The first question, what do I love? What do I love? What do I love in life? Now, love can be a really big word because that means that it's something big. Don't overthink this. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be yours. So what do you love? I. Jean, will write in here. I love solving complex problems. I love working with my team to identify their strengths and lift them up and giving them that one nugget, not 20, that one nugget that helps them expand just a little bit more. I love leading spin classes and seeing that one connection moment or hearing that one story at the end of it when somebody tells you, wow, you got me today.

And they share why. So just a small example of things that I love. I love a lot of things. I love walking my dog to the coffee shop because inevitably somebody will always want to pet him. And I know that in that moment, somebody's day just became a little better because they got to pet my dog. So things that you love, what are they? Capture all of them and don't stop. Check it out. All week long, that's question one. Question two, what does the world need more of? Now, this is really important when you're thinking about purpose.

And living with intention. What does the world need more of? For me right now, if I were to write that down on my paper, I'd write grace as one of my words. The world needs more grace. And how does that show up in my purpose? Holding space for people? Maybe some days people are a hot mess. We're all a hot mess on some days, myself included. But what if instead of judging somebody in that moment, I gave them grace? Because I don't know what happened before and I don't know what's going to happen next.

So what does the world need more of? And then the last question kind of helps you start to tap into your passions even more. What activities light you up and make you feel truly alive? Now that doesn't have to be outside of work, inside of work. If I'm answering that question, what activities light me up that make me feel really alive? If I'm at the Spin Studio, it's coming up with new ideas for our community. Working with our instructor team, our manager team, everybody on the team listening to their ideas to see what ideas can we make come to life that will have a positive impact on our community.

And people come here for a lot of reasons, not just fitness. They come here to feel connected, to find community, to release some negative emotions for their mental health. A whole bunch of reasons. What lights me up? I love working on crazy, messy problems and coming up with cool solutions to help people move forward. So in my client work, when I'm a consultant, I love when my clients come to me and they feel stuck and we come up with ideas and paths for them to get unstuck or solutions for an entire team to move forward and feel more connected.

I love lights me up every time somebody comes to me. So those are the three questions I'm going to give to you today. Write in your notebook, what do I love? What does the world need more of? What activities light you up and make you feel truly alive? The more that we can find answers to those simple questions, and maybe they're not simple, maybe you're having a really tough time. The more we can lean into trying to discover answers to those questions, the closer we can get, bit by bit, to discovering our purpose, leaning into our passion and being our authentic selves.

So I hope you all have a great Monday. So great to have you here. Thanks for joining. Check it out later today. Other Cadre contributors in this week. Just remember for 4% of your day is 45 minutes of time and each of these lives is about 15 minutes long. I went long today. Sorry, not sorry. Love you all. If somebody hasn't told you lately that they love you, I love you. I'm so proud of you for being here. And I can't wait to see you all again soon. Have the best day.