Resilience
‘I can’t change the wind, but I can adjust my sails.’
– Jimmy Dean
The wind of the COVID 19 outbreak is with us. We are all faced with living and working in a different world. However, we can adjust our sails. Certain aspects of life we need to accept COVID 19 and the restrictive guidelines imposed is a perfect example. However, we do have elements that we can control and influence. The challenge we can step up too is to change ourselves in the face of a situation we can’t change. As Victor Frankel puts it in his book Man’s Search For Meaning:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.
Opportunities
The conditions enforced on us by the COVID 19 outbreak can act as a catalyst to evaluate our ways of working, business processes, skills, knowledge and product propositions. We can give ourselves the best possible chance of being stronger as we come out of the crisis than we were when we went into it. We need to show a steely self discipline to the way we plan and execute our time. Ensuring we don’t get pulled into just being busy for being busy’s sake. Question the following:
- Do I need to be on this conference call or web meeting?
- Do I need to react to each every email and social media message as and when it arrives?
- Do I need to keep all the news feeds on to keep up to date with latest about the crisis?
- Am I planning in time for my personal and professional development? If not, why not?
Focus
Plan and execute our time on those activities that will afford success happening for us, and or those that will make us stronger and build our capabilities.
Hope
I have a broader hope: that coming out of the crisis we as the human race take the opportunities we have:
To evaluate what it is about our behaviour and habits that have caused the virus to happen. What we can change to mitigate future outbreaks.
We invest in global healthcare systems and best practice coping strategies, especially in the 3rd world, preparing ourselves for future outbreaks which the science tells us will inevitably happen.
Society is a kinder, more compassionate place, and the outbreak of goodwill will not dispute and die as we move out of the crisis.
