Monday’s will always get a bad rep.

And for good reason.

For most of us, Monday’s are the end of our personal freedom… the bookend to a glorious weekend. The conclusion of two days of blissful “me time” and the start of another work week. I’m sure there are some of you who simply can NOT wait for your alarm to ring at 6am on Monday morning.  But for a lot of folks, whether they love their jobs or not, work can be a grind.  Especially if you’re passionate about what you do. You WILL encounter stress, setbacks, resets, not to mention the variation of personalities we encounter everyday–just to make things interesting.  It’s all about how your frame and deal with these stressors–and more specifically, how you prepared yourself ahead of them.

The key is to set yourself up for success buy doing little things to help get your mind right and keep your body balanced and aligned, which will in turn make you FEEL better and boost your mood.

1. Have a Game Plan

The last thing you want to do is barrel into a Monday like a bull on the loose, just looking for the clearest path. Ease yourself into Monday by taking time to prepare on Sunday. Take at least a half hour to write out a “to do list” based on the things you want to accomplish that week, in order of their priority. Organizational experts recommend you keep your list to about 3 to-dos a day, that way you don’t overwhelm yourself and have a better chance to completing the tasks and increase your overall productivity.

2. Theme your Week

Bailey Frumen suggested to LSX that you theme your year as you enter a new one. And you can easily apply that same thought process to your week. On Sunday take a moment to reflect on the things you nailed and some of the things you can learn from and improve. Maybe you should have spoke up in a staff meeting the week before, so your week’s theme could be, “Be Bold, “Own it”, or “SLAY”! This will automatically give you sense of optimism to attack your week with purpose.

3. LEMON-AIDE

This is a great tip I learned from Candy Calderon, and I’ve been heavily implementing it into my (EARLY) morning routine for an extra jump start. Lemons are packed with potent vitamins and minerals like vitamin C, E, A and B6. It’s also loaded with calcium, iron, and zinc. Lemons also help to boost your immunity and cleanse your stomach, removing toxins (especially after a weekend of over indulging), all of which help to naturally increase your energy.

4. Create your own FIELD TRIP

Remember back in the day when you used to plan your school week around anything fun that would break up the monotony? Like a book fair, field trip, special lunch, etc. Literally ANYTHING that would add something fun and unexpected the routine. Clearly, we are no longer in elementary school and gone are the days of Spring, Summer and Winter break. But we can do little things like schedule a lunch or dinner with friends or a cocktail evening. And if your schedule allows, do a weekend or day trip to keep things interesting. The main objective is to set up events that you can look forward to and plan towards.