Hey Tiger! Sometimes you gotta be up to be down. Sometimes you gotta flip the narrative. How can you do more by doing less? Less scrolling negative social feeds, more nourishing the mind. Less procrastination, more creative inspiration. Take a quick prowl through our curated jungle of positive news bites. They say a Tiger can’t change its stripes, but it can read between the lines.
So, I’m feeling pumped. A huge thanks to all the epic individuals who completed the ‘Be the Change’ challenge this week! This community of challengers has sparked my own thinking; a sure-fire affirmation that we need to help people bridge the gap between knowing and doing. So often we know what we need to do. But we hold ourselves hostage on the way to doing it. Perfection, confidence, exhaustion, lack of proactive tools, lack of certainty… mean we fear taking leap from knowing to doing. Where knowing feels righteous, doing is just freakin’ scary!
But leaders that know better, do better.
Otherwise, are they really leaders?
actualize | ˈak(t)ʃʊəlʌɪz |
verb
make a reality of
Watch: What would grandma say? Just do right. Dr Maya Angelou’s 3-word secret is ‘just do right’. Forged from a life of knowing wrong, and doing right, Maya Angelou discusses how to take your internal beliefs and actualise them in the world, in every connection, at every small intervention. Wondering how this incredible voice became so strong? Read about Maya Angelou’s childhood in the piece My Terrible, Wonderful Mother.
Read: Everything is terrible but I’m fine! Derek Thompson for The Atlantic explores why there is a gap between “how I’m doing” and “how we are doing”. Spoiler: the answer is that the Everything is terrible but I’m fine philosophy is a consistent conundrum of human nature and one that perpetually reinforces the status quo. People all over the world tend to be individually optimistic and socially pessimistic. Sound familiar? We know something needs to be done, but it’s not so bad that we should get off our butts and actually do it.
Watch: The transformative power of sad songs on rainy days. Rainy days embody longing, the moments where we stop busily doing what we’re doing and pause to feel what we’re feeling. In this gap between what we spend our time doing and what we long to spend our time doing, lies the unwalked path to what we need, urgently, to get busy doing. Too often, ‘doing’ cops a bad wrap. Doing is difficult. Doing is hard work. But when we combine and align knowing and doing? Then the flood gates open to a new song.
Listen: Changing overthinking into a superpower to achieve your goals. Jon Acuff is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including his Wall Street Journal #1 bestseller, Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done. His latest book is Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking. In this conversation he talks about identifying overthinking, calling it what it really is (fear), and offering a simple plan to turn it from a super problem into a superpower.
Read: Self-actualisation, a sailboat not a pyramid. We’ve all seen the pyramid. At its foundation are physiological needs—shelter, food, clothing. Just above are psychological needs, like safety and belonging, followed by esteem needs—respect and freedom. And at the pinnacle beams self-actualization, representing potential fulfilled, a life well-lived. ‘The pyramid is an unfortunate metaphor’, says Scott Barry Kaufman, author of Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization. In this interview, he starts by dispelling a myth: Maslow never authored the famous pyramid.
Quiz: Where do you sit on the scale of self-actualisation? Test your knowledge of energy and its role in our climate system with NASA Climate Change experts.
Take it Easy Tiger, and thank you to everyone who’s joined our now 18,000+ strong community of Easy Tiger and Love Mondays readers. We appreciate your readership. If you’d like to help us spread the word, we would love you to share Easy Tiger with a friend.