There’s a man who works at Westbourne Park station in London. I can tell you without having ever spoken with him that his heart is full of love and he’s not afraid to show it. How do I know?
Because every morning he takes a selection of Metro newspapers, folds them and places them neatly along the window ledges just through the barriers. He puts them there, so that the weary commuter can grab them much more easily on the way through. Even better, if one such weary commuter has forgotten to grab a paper and is already through the barriers, they too have a lovingly prepared selection to choose from. That, my friends, is love in action. That man is invisibly kissing the face of every human he is making the day easier for, without them (or possibly him) quite realising that is what happening.
There’s another man, who gives out CityAM paper at Hammersmith station. He says good morning to everyone, high fives small children and generally beams love in the faces of all passers by, whether they indeed want a newspaper or not.
These men are heroes and they don’t even know it. Setting an example of love to all those who come into contact with them. And that love is infectious. When we do things with love, we start to love what we are doing even more as it feeds our own soul, just as much as everyone else’s.
So how do you inject love into your work? Well, no one besides you can really answer that, but I can tell you that I do it in the following ways:
- by making sure every candidate who applies to us for a role gets an email back from us, even if they’ve been unsuccessful.
- by being on time every day, with a great attitude, making sure I always try to look and feel my best.
- by making sure I attend meetings on time and as much as possible, by under–promising and over–delivering.
- by working smarter, not harder, and being careful to respect my own time and work/life balance, as much as I do everyone else’s.
- by remembering the important stuff for my team, by saying thank you as often as possible and by telling people when they have done a great job.
- by giving good and helpful feedback, to all people, so that they can take things on board and make changes if needs be.
- by taking other people’s feedback with a positive attitude, and by being humble enough to know that I don’t have all the answers – not even close!
There’s something quite magical that happens when things are done with love. Think of the things we buy and consume: I know I can see, taste and feel the difference when I consume something that’s been made with love. I used to give no consideration to what I was consuming, or how I was throwing it together, rushing to fit in with the rest of my life; I stuffed my face with lovelessness – both in terms of my poor diet, and my poor life choices. Now I am careful to only consume things that are prepared with love, whether by me or someone else.
Consider energy the same way. What is the energy that we are choosing to absorb on a daily basis? What do we choose to take on from other people? And, perhaps more importantly, what energy are we choosing to share?
The energy that we take in is often the energy that we pass on, so it’s worth us all being a little more protective of our own internal environment, and a little more selective about the energy we allow to permeate. I try to make sure that the energy I pass on to my fellow humans is loving and tender, whatever the interaction. That doesn’t mean that I/we allow people to walk all over us, by the way; quite the opposite, as we are able to stand with ourselves much stronger in love than we ever can in hate.
That energy doesn’t even have to be spread in physical form either, consider the energy you choose to share on the internet. Over the years, I have had many people commend and thank me for the amount of honesty and positivity I choose to spread on the internet, one such person reached out to me recently to thank me for a post I made a couple of years back and for the positive influence my experiences had (at the time) on her deciding what her next move might be. I am not special or unique in that sense, I’m just a human choosing to live in love now and to keep choosing and sharing that love, and that hasn’t always been so. I know there are times in all of our lives when things aren’t great; it’s just worth us all being a little more mindful of how much of that energy we choose to feed to others.
So, dear friends of the Internet, what I’m really trying to say is; let’s not be afraid to set the example of love, at work and in life in general. Once we truly love ourselves, that love will spread into everything we do and inspire others without us even being aware of it – just like our friends on the Hammersmith and City line.
‘Let your love and light keep shining, you never know who your light is guiding.’ – Natty