As the COVID-19 pandemic swells, we have no idea how tomorrow’s news will impact our daily lives and the people and organizations we care about most. Yet we each still need to function – take care of family, do our jobs, support our friends and communities, and stay physically and emotionally healthy.
So much of what we generally assume about our safety, mobility, resources, contributions, relationships, and futures is now uncertain. I’ve been reading and thinking about how we compensate for that void – in order to think, feel, and show up in healthy, effective ways.
- Come back to your sense of purpose. I don’t know about you, but my distractibility has reached new heights and my decisiveness has reached new lows. We are all swimming in so much not knowing! I am trying to focus more on my own sense of purpose – something that I still do know – to keep me focused and positive. When we reconfirm that our efforts — from small gestures to daunting projects — are indeed still personally meaningful, it is easier to accept being less productive, less successful, and less self-assured.
- Trust your wisdom. Conventional knowledge and expertise feel woefully insufficient now. Making decisions with far less information and control is scary. Thankfully, we each also hold valuable, less tangible wisdom from our cumulative lived experiences in our heads, our hearts and our bodies (literally). By slowing down and tuning in to our intuitive sense of things, we can be more valuable to others. We all know how to do difficult, uncomfortable things.
- Look to learn. The complex combination of misinformation, changing information and unpredictability in our lives feels numbing. Curiosity can be an antidote to anxiety. Not knowing is much more tolerable when we choose to be learners. Staying curious, with a lighter grip on what you already believe, has personal benefits beyond getting smarter for future challenges. It creates a bit of healthy emotional distance between ourselves and our experiences, it helps us be agile rather than rigid, it nudges us to try new things, and – importantly! — it connects us with others in meaningful ways.
In sum, please each sustain your belief in your ability to prevail in cooperation with others through the most challenging of times! That is not false hope. That is resilience. We need it.
