We are the Daymakers of Tomorrow

 Photo by: @leoshlo

'Do small things with great love' -David Wagner

Nearly 10 years ago, back in what seems another lifetime ago, I was working for an Aveda salon, and was introduced to the Daymaker Movement, founded by David Wagner, a fellow Aveda Salon owner. Just coming off my recent breakup from my Classical music career, I was re-building what it meant to trust myself, to trust my path, and most importantly open my heart. A stranger to self-help books, self-care, or any sort of emotional, psychological healing, I was much more rooted in the philosophy that you struggle to survive, and I was figuring out how to survive. That was, until one of my bosses gave me David's book 'Life as a Daymaker'.  It changed my world!

I had considered myself a person passionate about Customer Service, yet my growth was always stunted by a consistent underlying judgement I felt towards others, due to previous traumas, and stories. Because of this book,  any idea of who, or what I thought I was, got flipped upside down by this book, by an idea. (I honestly feel it was the discovery of this book and a growing passion of connection that led me to leave my Salon life and shift into becoming a Yoga teacher)

David speaks in his book about how 'the simplest act of kindness could make someone’s day and possibly even cause a worldwide ripple effect'. Wait, you mean, my actions, my conversations can effect hundreds of people?

Mind.

Blown.

Living in my own little world, my conversations had very much to do with my own agenda. How much time someone was taking up in my own day, if I thought they were wrong, or wright, if I cared, if I didn't care, and most importantly, if I thought they were lying. When I finished reading David's book, I started to see a whole other side to human psychology, and understanding. We were all truly doing the best that we can. And through little acts of kindness, we have the ability to really make someone's day, so they can be inspired to make someone else's, so forth, and so forth. Through the smallest of actions, we can begin to change the world!


A decade passes, my career trajectory has changed, my goals have shifted, and my mind slowly started to filter the ideas of David's movement to the back of my head. It's not that I forgot, yet it wasn't a muscle I was actively flexing, or being mindful about flexing. Not until last month, when on a leadership call, the idea of 'Changing the Trajectory of Someone's Day' was brought up, and everything started to click. My salon life was not so far removed from my Yoga life. Everything began to Yoke, to unite, which is Yoga! A concept that was surrounded by cobwebs, came back alive, and it came back full force.

Beyond inspired by this re-emergence of a very familiar concept, I decided to test it out again, as a form of a gratitude practice, hoping that the energy I was giving, would be returned. From the way I held conversations with fellow instructors, to the way I interacted with EVERY student at the desk, in addition to how I shifted conversations with my family (gasp), I slowly started noticing an internal shift, a shift I hadn't felt in a long time.

Not only was I providing the world with the extra love and shifts that it needed, but I was receiving it back in forms of my own personal energy. Regardless of how tired I am, what I think I should or shouldn't be doing, every person who crossed my path, was the only one who mattered at that exact moment. Risking burn out, exhaustion, and just the pain that comes in the space between, I needed this more than the person who's day I potentially made. I needed this extra jolt of energy, of love, of connection. And all of this was done, just by going out of the way to show the person I'm with, in that exact moment, that they are the only one that matters.

So I ask you, humans, what are you doing today, to be a grounded leader, in this uprooted world? How are you offering yourself to change the trajectory in just one person's day? What does that look like?

It can be as simple as a smile when you bump into someone, providing a compliment, covering someone at work, paying for the coffee behind you in line, holding space for someone having a rough day, to making eye contact and genuinely asking them how their day was going.

It is easy to think we are walking this world alone, and especially easy if we're not getting 'anything back'. But knowing, that we must give, in order to receive, how can we be a part of this energy exchange, that will eventually, human, by human, begin to change the world.

It starts today, right here, with you, my little daymaker. SO next time you're allowing your emotions and your fears take over, come back to this idea of just giving one simple act of love, before you move on.

The time to cast your ripples is now.

“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.”-Mother Theresa