The social norm now seems to be to encourage everyone to do what they love.
More and more I hear stories of people who have left the thing that they did for years, that they hated, to chase their dreams of sailing around the world or opening a book shop or a cafe or a riding school.
I absolutely subscribe to the fact that you are much more likely to be successful doing something you like than doing something you hate.
It’s fascinating that there is even now some quite compelling research to suggest that parents who work part-time in jobs that they don’t like have a worse effect on their children than parents that work more than full-time in a job that they love.
It turns out that the atmosphere at home and the mood of the parents is one of the most important things in parenting.
The flip side of this coin is though that what you love is a labour of love.
You love the process of building something, of creating your art or that thing that you want to use to put your mark on the world.
The difficulty with that journey is that it is fraught with ups and therefore fraught with downs.
On the one hand we tell a story of people who went into a business that they loved and were happy for the rest of their lives but on the other hand we understand that no matter who you are, Monday morning is usually Monday morning.
Many years ago I had the privilege to speak about this very subject with Chris Hoy before he competed in the 2012 olympics.
He told myself (and a collected group of people) that the walk to the velodrome in Manchester on a Monday morning was terrible and the first revolution of the track, as he started his warm up, felt like climbing the highest of mountains.
Is that what it feels like for you?
Does Monday morning feel like a hurdle that has to be overcome?
The joy of embracing the process is that it is a process.
It means that we are moving something (our work or our family or anything else) from here to there, where there is defined as something better.
It’s much easier to deal with the Monday morning (and it’s interesting to note that if you take Mondays off your Monday morning is therefore Tuesday morning) when we know that it’s part of the process to get to somewhere better.
Last weekend was an extraordinary weekend for me, absolutely full of lovely things including jobs that I did at home, watering the plants, bucketing out the inflatable hot-tub (which was green) to refill it to start again, catching up with stuff at home that I should have caught up with ages ago, yoga, riding my bike an awful long way in the sunshine, a meal out with family and lots of meals eaten outside in the garden.
By the time I got up on Monday morning to go to work I was tired (really busy weekend) and I was sore (really long bike ride the day before) and so, going to work felt hard and looking down my list of Monday morning patients seemed difficult.
It’s easy though to just begin, like Chris Hoy’s first lap around the track, and do the first one and the next one and realise that drip, drip, minute by minute you’re working through your process to get from here to there.
Blog Post Number - 2799
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