Challenge #1: Starting With Ease

Time to read: 45 seconds to read. Doing this challenge will give you time

Summer ease!

Welcome to the first day of your summer challenge!

Each week, an easy challenge will arrive in your inbox. Each activity/change/new perspective will be easy to implement alongside your regular life, meaning you don't have to buy special equipment or add to your mental load.

You may already be doing some of the things. Some may be new. You may choose to do some and not others. You might do some for one day and repeat others until they integrate into habits.

I encourage you to do as many as you can to get the most out of this experience. You have a week to practice and some will stick with you all summer and perhaps forever.

Many small shifts over the course of the summer will add up to profound change - healthier habits, feeling good in your body, and a calmer mind.

So, here is your first challenge.

This week, make one thing easy each day. Watch for something in your day that feels hard...scheduling something, a conversation with a colleague, getting home on time. (Don't start with something big like dating or asking for a raise, unless, of course, you can easily make those things easy.)

Simply look at the situation and ask yourself: What would make this easy? Then do that. Maybe pick up the phone. Maybe cancel the meeting. Maybe simply put things down until tomorrow and leave. (Hint: Sometimes the easy thing is to do nothing. I find that when I wait, often things become easy on their own. That's legit.)

So, a challenge that is all about ease and calm in your life starts with the practice of EASE. Ease is the foundation. You will practice it this week and then ease will be the lens for every challenge this summer.

Please invite your friends and colleagues to join you. All they have to do is sign up for this newsletter to be part of the fun. They can sign up here.

If you have something you'd like me to address in this challenge, please reach out. Tell me the thing you'd like to shift, and I'll add a challenge tailored for you (and you can bet others need it, too!).

Summer Challenge! Get ready!

Time to read: Ready for a summer of easy progress?!

If you change the direction of a ship by a few degrees, over time it will end up in a completely different continent.

The same is true in your life and work. Small, easy changes add up. You can change your body, how you spend your time, your relationships, and your stress level without a lot of effort and while you do your regular life.

Each week this summer, you will receive one small challenge. The challenges will be tiny actions that you can do that day and if you like it, incorporate into your life and work going forward. Do as many as you like. Over the course of the summer, they will add up to big transformation.

Please invite your friends and colleagues to join you. All they have to do is sign up for this newsletter to be part of the fun. They can sign up here.

I'm excited to give you a summer of easy action. If you have any particular requests, please reach out to tell your ideas and desires. I'm happy to tailor the weekly challenges to your needs.

Great ready to start next week and go through August.

Back To Basics

Time to read: Short and immediately actionable

Eat your vegetables!

One of my coaching groups was talking about stress this morning. As the group outlined the strategies they use to manage stress and regulate mood, our 90-minute call sent us right back to the basics.

It's so easy to forget that managing stress is fundamentally a physical exercise. Meaning, it's about your body and soothing your nervous system. The list of strategies we created was so good, I wanted to share them with you.

You won't be surprised. You will be reminded of what's actually effective to manage stress:

• Exercise (move your body!)
• A healthy diet (eat your veggies!)
• Sleep (rest and recover!)
• Meditation (so soothing for the nervous system!)
• Focus on process over outcome (become unattached!)
• Know what is yours to own and what is not (discern and let things go!)

It's that simple. Move your body and eat vegetables. Oh, and sleep. Doesn't it seem like these are the answers to everything?

Have a great time playing with these this weekend!

Invite your friends to join for the fun weekly challenge that will run this summer (aka: this newsletter in challenge form). They can join the summer challenge by signing up for this newsletter here.

Do You Feel Free Or Like A Hostage?

Time to read: So short and so relevant

FREE!

When you look around your career, do you feel free or do you feel like a hostage? As you assess this question, here are some hints:

Hostage:

• Your happiness and fulfillment are tied to (fill in the blank), your compensation, performance appraisal, raise, promotions, kudos from your boss. If you feel like you're constantly chasing the cookie, then you're trapped on a hamster wheel you feel you can't stop.
• You constantly think about making a change but never do.
• You feel like the risks of change (quitting your job, changing your perspective, seeing a therapist or coach) are more terrifying than putting up with the way things are.
• You wrestle with the same stress, decision point, or situation on repeat.

Free:

• You enjoy what you do (most days) and feel like you make a difference, to your coworkers, company, those you serve.
• You know that no matter the circumstances, you choose every day to be wherever you are.
• You feel like your work uses the best parts of you. You may be exhausted sometimes, and it's the "well used" kind of exhausted.
• Your work supports and balances well with the other parts of your life...family, free time, hobbies, health, rest.
• The balance of your life feels right to you. Even if that means you work 80 hours a week or you have all the free time in the world.

What I want for each of you is to feel free. Free doesn't mean nothing but free time or no work. It means that you feel like you have agency to craft your days through the lens of your priorities, style, and desires.

This summer, this newsletter is going to be a short and easy weekly challenge to help you feel more free. You don't have to sign up. You already are.

Invite your friends. They can join the summer challenge by signing up for my newsletter here.

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