How I structure meals, movement and mindset around leadership

Jemima Ngode, CHRP (K) Group HR Manager, Radio Africa GroupIn the first two pieces, I wrote about the salad bowl and the glass — what’s on my plate and what I sip through the day. This piece is different. It’s about time. Because I learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, that none of those habits mean much as one-off choices. They only work for me as a rhythm — something built into the shape of my week, not squeezed in when I remember.

I want to say upfront: I don’t follow this perfectly. Some weeks fall apart by Wednesday. But the structure itself, even when I miss parts of it, has changed how I show up as a leader more than any single meal or drink ever could. And running through all of it, every single day, is one habit I almost left out of this series because it doesn’t involve food or movement at all: reading.

The Thread That Runs Through Everything — Reading and Studying

Before I walk through my week day by day, I want to name this separately because it doesn’t belong to any one day — it belongs to all of them. I read or study something every single day, even if it’s just a few pages before bed or an article during a commute. Not always leadership material. Sometimes fiction, sometimes something completely unrelated to work.

I came to this late, honestly. For years, I treated reading as something for holidays, for “when I have time” — which, of course, never arrived on its own. What changed my mind was noticing how much sharper my thinking felt in weeks when I’d been reading regularly versus weeks when I hadn’t touched a book at all. It wasn’t dramatic. It was subtle, the same way the salad and the water are subtle. But subtle, repeated daily, adds up to something real over a month.

I’ve come to think of it as feeding a different kind of hunger — the mind’s, not the body’s. And just as I wouldn’t skip meals all week and expect to feel steady by Friday, I’ve learned I can’t starve my thinking all week and expect good judgment when a hard decision lands on my desk.

Jemima Ngode, CHRP (K) Group HR Manager, Radio Africa Group

Monday — Setting the Tone, Not Just the Tasks

Monday used to be my worst day. I’d walk into the week already behind, my mind racing through everything I hadn’t done Friday. What changed things for me wasn’t a productivity hack — it was moving my body before I opened my laptop. A short walk, sometimes just fifteen minutes around the block, before I look at a single email.

Breakfast on Mondays, for me, is deliberately simple — oats with fruit, sometimes a green smoothie if I have avocado on hand. Nothing heavy. I learned that a heavy Monday breakfast left me sluggish through my first planning meeting, and Monday is the day I most need to be sharp, not full.

I also try to start the week with a few pages of something — often a short article or a chapter I left off the week before. It sets a tone I’ve come to rely on: that this week, like the last, will have some room for ideas beyond my inbox.

These are, for me, the days packed with back-to-back meetings, the days when decisions pile up. This is when the celery-lemon-cucumber-matcha mix earns its place, usually mid-afternoon, right around the point when I used to reach for a third coffee.

Lunch on these days is almost always some version of that salad I wrote about in Part One — lettuce, tomatoes, onions, nuts, fruit, olive oil, lemon. Not because I’m rigid about it, but because I’ve noticed I make clearer decisions in afternoon meetings when lunch didn’t leave me feeling heavy. That’s just what I’ve observed in myself, meeting after meeting, over time.

Movement on these days looks different — sometimes just a walk between calls, sometimes skipping rope for ten minutes before a difficult one-on-one. I’ve started treating movement as punctuation in my day, not an event I need an hour for.

Reading on these packed days is short by necessity — a few pages before I sleep, sometimes an audiobook chapter during a drive. I’ve stopped expecting myself to read for an hour on grind days. Even ten minutes keeps the thread alive.

Jemima Ngode, CHRP (K) Group HR Manager, Radio Africa Group enjoys her smoothie

Thursday — The Day I Protect for Thinking

By Thursday, I’m usually tired in a specific way — not sleepy, but mentally cluttered. This is the day I lean hardest on the beetroot and carrot-ginger juices, and it’s also the day I try to protect at least one block of quiet time, even fifteen minutes, before big decisions.

I’ve learned that my mindset on Thursdays needs less “pushing through” and more clearing out. A ginger shot before a hard conversation. A short, unscheduled walk if a decision feels foggy. I used to treat these as luxuries. Now I treat them as part of the job. Often, that same quiet block is where I do my most deliberate reading of the week — something denser, something I actually want to sit with rather than skim.

Friday, for me, isn’t just the last workday — it’s when I try to notice what actually worked that week and what didn’t. I don’t do this formally, just a few quiet minutes, sometimes with a smoothie in hand, sometimes on a short walk home.

I’ve found collagen and pawpaw fit naturally into Friday mornings for me — not because Friday is different physically, but because by then I’m thinking less about the next meeting and more about sustaining this pace for the long run. It’s a small mental shift, but it matters to me. Friday is also when I sometimes jot down what I’ve read that week — not a formal review, just a line or two on what stuck, so it doesn’t disappear the way so much of what we consume quietly does.

I used to treat weekends as the opposite of the workweek — no structure at all. Over time, I noticed that swinging that hard in the other direction left me just as depleted come Monday. Now I try to keep a lighter version of the rhythm going, but shaped very differently from my weekdays.

Weekends, for me, are when I get my longest time on the trails — not a rushed fifteen-minute walk between meetings, but a real stretch of time moving, often the longest walk or run of my entire week. It’s also when I do my pantry refill, stocking up on the lettuce, tomatoes, nuts, fruit, and everything else that makes the weekday rhythm possible in the first place. Without that Saturday or Sunday reset, the whole week’s structure quietly falls apart by Wednesday.

Weekends are also when functions and visits fill my time — family, friends, the parts of life that don’t show up on a work calendar but matter just as much to how steady I feel come Monday. Between the trail time, the pantry refill, and the people I make time for, my weekends end up just as active as my weekdays, only differently so. Looking back, I think this is what adds up to what I’d call an active life — not one long workout, but movement and preparation and connection, stitched together across two days.

This is also when I do my longest reading — an actual chapter or two, uninterrupted, sometimes on a trail break, sometimes in the quiet after everyone’s left a family gathering. It’s where the week’s scattered ten-minute reading sessions get a chance to breathe into something deeper.

This is where mindset does its quiet work, in my experience — not through discipline, but through space. Space to notice how the week felt, not just what got done in it, and space to prepare for the one coming next.

A meal prepared by Jemima Ngode, CHRP (K) Group HR Manager, Radio Africa Group

A meal prepared by Jemima Ngode, CHRP (K) Group HR Manager, Radio Africa Group

Why the Structure Matters More Than Any Single Choice

If there’s one thing I’ve taken from building this rhythm, it’s this: no single salad, no single ginger shot, no single walk, no single book transformed how I lead. What did was the accumulation — the same small choices, repeated enough times, in a shape that fit my actual week rather than an idealised one.

I share this not as a template to copy, but as one honest account of what building a sustainable rhythm has looked like for me. Your week looks different from mine, and it should. But I’d gently offer this: the moments that matter most in leadership — the hard conversations, the big decisions, the days you need to be steady for someone else — rarely announce themselves in advance. In my experience, the only real preparation is the rhythm you’ve already built before they arrive — fed as much by what you eat and how you move as by what you read and how often you let your mind rest and stretch.

This closes this series for now — though I suspect it’s less an ending than a pause. There’s likely more to explore: how this rhythm holds up under real crisis, or how it looks when travel and time zones disrupt it entirely.

Jemima Ngode, CHRP (K) Group HR Manager, Radio Africa Group