Keeping your morale in an upright position is your responsibility, no one else’s.
You can look to others for a mood boost and to help fine tune your mindset but at the end of the day, it’s down to you.
You are the Chief Morale Officer. You are the self-booster.
You might not want the job but it’s yours and it’s yours for life.
Your main tasks are to:
- Grow your enthusiasm
- Upgrade your thinking
- Carry a Duchenne smile
- Be your own cheerleader
- Generate hope
- Convey an abundance of warmth
- Lift yourself up
- Find the silver lining
- Pulsate positivity
- Be a catalyst of optimism
This sounds like a tall order.
And it is.
It is when you commit to the job full-time but that’s what we must be willing to do if we want to reap the rewards of a healthy headspace. Morale has to be enduring not momentary.
Morale is a positive state of mind derived from leadership, your leadership. It comes from having a strong sense of self-worth coupled with a strong sense of purpose. It is not just what you think but what you do and how you do it.
Keeping your morale high during day-to-day life is tough enough but throw in a life-threatening illness and it’s the toughest job you’ll ever have.
To power your own resilience, confidence and self-respect, you have to do what Churchill did in WWII – feed yourself propaganda. A fair degree of self-censorship and self-editing is required too.
Keeping your morale up during an illness is especially hard because there’s quite a lot conspiring to drag you down. The opposition and hardship is delivered daily to your door. But this is where our emotional intelligence steps forward.
During WWII, victories were emphasised whereas discussion of defeats was kept to a minimum.
We can do the same. Any little win that we experience in the day or through the week, we focus on that rather than on something that didn’t work out. Give yourself some easy wins too to strengthen your frame of mind.
We give ourselves pep talks and we don’t allow ourselves to get down-hearted.
Make yourself feel like you can achieve anything and can overcome any odds.
Feed yourself slogans, expressions, words, images, music and motivational messages. I do this daily and make sure that I never miss a beat. This is psychological warfare remember!
The single most important factor in succeeding is keeping that morale high and the force of your willpower is what will keep it there. Morale fuels your combat and offensive spirit. It helps you feel energised, productive and engaged with the world around you.
To mean anything, morale has to promote and push positive action.
You can make or break yourself depending on whether your morale is high or low. It is central to our wellbeing and protects our mental health.
When we maintain morale we can achieve maximum courage, equanimity and peace of mind. High morale is a force multiplier.