Hump Day. Halfway there.
Happy Friday! The weekend is here.
OMG, its Sunday evening… where did the weekend go?
Monday… here we go again. Sound familiar?
If so, chances are you’re living for the weekend.
Did you know that the most valuable currency you have isn’t time and it isn’t money? It’s your heartbeats. Some of us will have more, some have less, but we all have a limited amount of them.
How are you choosing to spend your heartbeats?
If you’re living for the weekend, you’re trading five days worth of heartbeats for two. That doesn’t seem like a valuable trade. In fact, it’s a negative return on investment. When we focus on the weekend we are potentially missing “the gold” in our working day.
But we’re all in the same boat, aren’t we?
Not necessarily.
What are the QUALITY of the heart beats you are spending during the week?
Here’s what I mean. You can go your whole life, searching for meaning. Chances are you're looking in the wrong place. We look for it in our job, in our family, in activities that are fun, exciting and rewarding.
You are a meaning-maker; meaning is whatever you “hold in mind”. As a meaning-maker, what you give meaning to then defines and governs your experiences. It is or becomes your reality. Your meanings can range from toxic, limiting, trivial, conventional to enriching, empowering, passionate and so on.
Depending on what meaning you are bringing to your work week, this will directly impact your performance - how you show up, how you experience and how you connect, relate and communicate.
If I held disempowering meanings about my role, my family and my workweek - how do you think I’d feel? And in turn, how would I perform, given how I felt?
That’s why I choose to live through empowering meanings - to be a role model for my daughters, that it’s possible to play multiple roles, as a career woman and a mother.
Why? That they too can aspire to be whoever they want to be in the world while giving to their families.
The meaning that I bring to my coaching role is that it is such a privilege to be witness and part of someone taking charge of their own life in the most resourceful way.
My experience, sure sometimes hectic, is an experience of deep satisfaction and gratitude to be living to my fullest potential and connecting and relating to others along the way.
What meanings do you currently bring to your life and how does it affect your experience of it?
Would you like to change it?
Take a moment to write down, all the things that are important to you about what you’re spending majority of your heartbeats on during the week.
What would be meaningful for you to live for today?
What’s important to you about those things?
What’s even more important than that?
Keep going until you find the meaning that really resonates.
When I did this exercise I realised my biggest why was on behalf of living the most resourceful life to my fullest potential. Understanding the why made the how easy.
Sure along the way it can get bumpy. It certainly did for me - with meetings, deadlines, balancing both work and home and sometimes realising at 10pm I still haven’t washed the sports uniforms for the kids. Or when I realised the only downtime I have had during the week is that small window of when I get into bed just before getting to sleep to wake up and do it all again.
For me that reality was going to show up anyway - my freedom came from being really intentional as to why I was doing what I was doing and being really clear on the meaning I had associated with it.
The quality of your meanings, determines the quality of your life moment by moment.
What if you could choose? The good news is, you can.
Imagine bringing the meaning you’ve found to the work that you do. How does that change your experience of it? What would you do differently?
The possibilities are endless. And that's my offer. Choose wisely how you’d like to spend your heartbeats, otherwise they’ll get chosen for you. Live for moment, not for the weekend.
Madeliene Robinson