Beyond Doing lies Effortlessness
E67: Your capacity to create joy, connection and courage
It’s because of my monkey mind that always tries to connect the dots of my awareness.
That’s one of the reasons earlier this year I chose this word to focus on for 2024 👇
Effortlessness.
Effortlessness is something I work on cultivating in myself so I can show up and be fully present.
To have the energy and space from a nervous system that’s calm and a brain that’s focused
To know that I can tap into the skills, knowledge and intuition I've gathered over the years for the moments when it really matters
To show up as consistently as I can as the best version of me.
The way I go about bringing this version of effortlessness to life - and embody it - is through three pillars:
Enhancing our capacity to connect - to ourselves and to others
Re-discovering the joy in what we do
Unlocking our courage to change
I call it "Effortless Leadership" for short.
Our capacity for effortlessness
One of the benefits of choosing a word to focus on is how my relationship to it changes over the year - what I learn, what are the circumstances when it’s in focus (or not).
Over the past few months I’ve noticed that capacity is a key foundation for effortlessness.
Capacity here doesn't only invoke a sense of being able to think, act or feel something but being able to hold something, too.
It's like a jewellery box that contains your precious gems:
The practices that allow you to experience joy.
The strategies you have to be courageous.
The ways you show up to be fully present with others, no matter how stormy the mood in your meeting might be.
You want to be able to guard them safely, and allow them to develop their own sparkle as you grow, but also be able to use them in the moment when it matters.
Here are two recent examples of how capacity has come up with my clients:
Capacity for being
A professional client who is one of the leaders in her field felt anxious about not reaching her career goals fast enough and that something was missing or lacking.
It's easy to try to create the next level of success by relying on what we've done in the past.
But something changed: her colleagues noticed her energy was different. She was showing up with equanimity - powerful, yet graceful, as a swan.
It was nothing to do with what she needed to do, or what new skills she needed to learn.
Rather it was to allow herself to relax, to slow down, to give herself space.
She became aware of the power of her capacity for being.
She's noticing some of that effortlessness percolating in, too.
Capacity to take courageous action
When you're an entrepreneur running a business and get a cancer diagnosis, it's hard to try something that goes against conventional wisdom.
Medical experts will say that "diet doesn't matter".
Family members might force you to stick to conventional medicine, rather than incorporating an integrative approach, "or else".
A cancer diagnosis can focus your mind on what's important, but it can also be very stealthy and rob you of joy, as one of my clients discovered.
But with joy, the quality of everything else changed for this individual: there was a greater sense of lightness, a renewed confidence, a sense of hope.
And above all, a smile.
👉 Over to you!
What ideas have these two examples sparked in you?
What capacity do you most rely on?
What capacity serves you the least that you would like to enhance?
ps If you’re an entrepreneur, a lawyer or another high-flying professional - who’s looking to bring joy back into your work and home life - by building a healthy brain for a career that’s full of success in a way that feels effortless, get in touch and let’s have a conversation.
That’s it for this week!
As always, I appreciate your feedback on Effortless Thursdays.
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To your health and success!
Eric
I'm very appreciative that you're staying with this core focus on effortlessness, exploring it from different angles and holding up the effortlessness gem for us in the light so we can its facets. I'm particularly engaged by this latest framework of:
The practices that allow you to experience joy.
The strategies you have to be courageous.
The ways you show up to be fully present with others, no matter how stormy the mood in your meeting might be.
This is useful, it's unique, and it's really you.
It's a joy to watch you stick with the effortless vision, stand by it, and refine how you're communicating it. Plus, I NEED effortlessness and this helps.