I love Mondays!

I used to HATE Mondays…

Funny how life changes…

In my Accenture days or freelance consultancy days, Mondays meant reeeeeeealllly early starts… to get to wherever the client site was. My worst trip was the one to work for New Look in Weymouth on the South Coast of the UK, when I lived in South London. It consisted of tubes, buses, a train, a change, and a long meandering drive (beautiful if you weren’t in a rush!), hugely frustrating drive behind tractors or caravans as there were so few overtaking places…in a random hire car. Up at the crack of dawn only to arrive by lunchtime to get some terrible food in a meagre canteen above the ‘shed’ as we would fondly refer to the huge warehouse and distribution centre for this up and coming fast fashion retailer.

It was those Mondays that used to eat in to your Sundays… rather than relaxing on the sofa, holding a roast-full-tummy, snoozing to the Antiques Roadshow, I would be restless, dashing around the house packing a suitcase, searching a laptop bag and paperwork that I may have thrown under a bed in disgust… and where the hell was my ‘on call’ phone?! Ugh – that was another hell… the fear of being called in the middle of the night to log into the computer system and work out why an overnight batch schedule had failed.. Black screens, green letters and blinking cursors – I hope I never see you again…. Cold, panic sweats as I used to fear whatever I did would bring a whole warehouse picking team to a stand still, waiting in a cold Weymouth car park at 4am, shaking their fists at me…. ‘the tech geek’, warm in a pink hotel room, under a duvet, laptop open, hair wild with frustration as I look for a bit of false information that has caused the system crash…

I digress… my old life… one I look back on, fondly, with good memories too of working with brilliant, talented minds, big drinkers… it wasn’t all screen time, only 90% of it. The rest was flaming drambuies, tiger tiger, back slapping….

So to the Mondays of my todays…

Instead of a nervous panic searching for lost items, it is more of a game… getting the boys to get their books together, do they have the right sports kit, enough socks, have they learnt their spellings? If not, they soon will…   I use a timer…How quickly can we do it this week? The quicker they do it, the quicker we can watch a family movie, snuggle up… play a board game (their favourite is Monopoloy James Bond 007 – brilliant if you have boys!).

For me, Sundays are the end of a week and a time for reflection. I look forward to waking up at 6, ready to plan the week ahead, start a fresh; out with the old, in with the new – how can we improve this week? Easy this week for me – last week was a write off! So I am re-arranging my cancelled meetings, back to pilates at 6am, back to healthy eating, back to the gym, spin and I may try something new this week? Hot yoga? What will I share with my class on Thurday – the topic is Role Models – what a great subject to research…  What coaching topic shall I share with my team, my leaders that I build businesses with..?

Who will I meet? What will I learn?

Bring it on Monday!