Good morning from an absolutely lovely Vancouver. I’ve been driving with the top down on the convertible this weekend; wrapped in a scarf, but still! And today is no different. My adventures today will involve a little bit of driving and the top will be down still, and it is mid-October! For those of you who are not resident in Canada, there is nothing quite like a beautiful Fall day as we know that the rain (or the snow in other parts) is coming, and will be with us for some months. Having lunch with a friend on Sunday, who said that this time of year she is always hungry, and wondered if it was a deep biological memory of storing up fat for the long winter ahead! Whether or not that is physiologically true, it is symbolic of the changes inherent this time of year.

Our business cycles are often simply mirroring the natural world, I am always busier in the fall than in the mid-winter of January for example. (I wonder if that is the case in reverse in the Southern hemisphere?) And paradoxically, our business cycles are in actual fact mechanistic systems that often twist away from if not interfere with the natural rhythms of life. An easy example is what happens in day long meetings after lunch; how often have you sat in a meeting listening to yet another boring speaker after lunch? The poor sod scheduled to speak then might in fact have some great content but our biological response to lunch is often to snooze; s/he is up against nature in that meeting room and is pushing a very large rock up a very large hill!

One of the things I’ve learned this weekend is the power of simple and easy. And the simple and easy feel more often than not ‘natural.’ I don’t mean that we avoid challenges, rather that we recognize them for what they are, simply challenges. Rather than fighting against them, we might ask ourselves, ‘what am I supposed to be learning here?’ and/or, ‘is this challenge, or are parts of this challenge my own making?’ And once we can look at them through that lens, a lens that allows us to ‘let go’ we can find new and perhaps easier ways through the challenge. Then, we will find that the universe actually opens up to the simple and easy.

So, instead of building an agenda that has the VP of Finance give a quarterly up date, or a short talk on derivatives after lunch, build in some time (15 minutes after lunch) for meeting participants to go outside for some fresh air for 15 minutes. I’m learning to say  “if you’re checking messages, do it outside”. Or, have the first item on the agenda after lunch be a dialogue amongst the participants exploring a material question. Simple and easy. And once our natural rhythms have brought us back to full alertness, then the VP of Finance can shine.

May this week be a week of simple and easy in many parts of our lives.