Don’t Waste This Chance to be Your Best Self

I have a professional colleague who asked me to be his mentor several years ago. He reached out to me recently: “I have a professional question for you – we are about to go through a reduction in force, furlough coworkers, and cut coworkers hours because of COVID-19. How do you deal with uncertain times like this professionally and mentally”?

Hmmm… good question.

The internet and LinkedIn are full of articles about how to cope and perform during these uncertain COVID times but suddenly, these all fell short. He was reaching out for help. 

This was personal…

I started by saying that it’s a great question! It is important that we acknowledge that. We have never been through anything like this before ever. Therefore our frame of reference and our past experiences don’t really serve us very well. 

This is a time of high stress. Besides our experiences that help us navigate during trying times, our bodies have their own response – we know it as “fight or flight”. But this moniker is actually incomplete. There are four responses to the stress response: fight, flight, freeze, and collapse. During the stress response, your body is trying to prioritize what it needs to do to survive. With the constant COVID coverage and the unique problems it presents, it’s no wonder we are all exhausted and overwrought.

One thing, I told my colleague, was that this experience will be incredibly educational for him. There is a leadership competency called “dealing with ambiguity”. This is a tremendous opportunity to learn how to navigate when you don’t know the answers. When sword steel is put in fire, it either gets stronger or it falls apart. This is an opportunity to become stronger.

I think a focus on considering what can be gained out of this experience is really important: It will make us more nimble and more compassionate, it will make us better leaders, it will make us better equipped to deal with ambiguity, and it will make the next crisis all the more easy to deal with.

Knowing him (he is a very reflective individual) I suggested he try keeping a journal of what he has learned from this situation every day – kind of like a gratitude journal but not quite. I instructed him to try to keep it positive by focusing on lessons learned. I have been doing this for a couple of weeks now as a way to build material for an article I had planned to write on “lessons learned “; and this activity has had the unintended consequence of making me feel better during this time.

This too shall pass but as someone said, don’t let a good crisis go to waste. This is a time to be your best self. To learn, to grow, and to be better than you ever were!

Thank you G – for inspiring me to write this article!