Navigating Tumultuous Times
“When we take time to reflect, assess, and get clear, we can take action from a place of congruence and power.
We are not only able to move (instead of feeling stuck and overwhelmed), but also, we feel hope for our own change or transformation.”
The past two years have created more introspection and big questions than any other time in my lifetime. Even in times of personal challenge, tragedy, or loss—those times when it’s expected we will re-examine our illumined life path—nothing compares to co-experiencing a global pandemic, thousands of deaths worldwide, disruption to our lives, isolation from those we love, and chronic change in our work. It seems we continue to experience changes locally and globally, and many companies are fostering the courageous conversations they must have.
Most of the first year of the pandemic, my conversations and coaching were focused primarily on listening actively, delivering empathy (and helping others do the same), and finding ways to find hope in this question: What’s uniquely mine to do?
There really isn’t anyone I know who doesn’t benefit from the sobriety message, “One Day at a Time,” because the levels of frustration and uncertainty are woven like golden threads throughout our daily experience. Back then, we wrestled with questions of the most basic elements: your health, your shelter, your connections, your work. And, if we’d labored under the idea that we could hold our work and our personal lives separate, we were proven wrong over and over, sometimes by literally seeing into our colleagues’ homes, garages, backyards, and bedroom offices. We all had to reorganize our thinking and stories of how things are and who we are. Every single person stood on the cliff edge of “what if?” for months. And, truth be told, everything on some level has changed, even inside the things we think that haven’t.
The most important thing we can do, whether we are working, not working, creating, or stuck, is to develop the intimate practice that becomes our bridge to the world: What, now, is uniquely mine to do? This is the perfect time to ask this question of ourselves, again.
Of course, this is an existential question, a big, pondering question, but it is also an invitation to the ordinary, daily review of my task list or work “to-dos.” When we take time to reflect, assess, and get clear, we can take action from a place of congruence and power. We are not only able to move (instead of feeling stuck and overwhelmed), but also, we feel hope for our own change or transformation. And, in those places and spaces we inhabit and desire to influence, we might take the tiniest step or the biggest leap towards what’s next.
This isn’t easy. What’s easy is to remain stuck. To feel like a victim of circumstance or things outside our ken. What’s painfully easy is to succumb to the seductive negativity and despair that we may need to feel initially, but we do not need to court. Feeling our feelings about what has happened, what is happening, is critical, because we cannot listen deeply to another, or show the empathy we need for each other, if we choose to bypass and lean into the platitude: it’s all good. Because, sometimes, it isn’t.
In late 2020, a global client asked me if I’d be willing to coach some leaders through a difficult process. For over nine months, despite losing 70% of their revenues, they kept their employees on the payroll, hoping, with each month, the news of going back to work would become more than a wish, and it would happen. It didn’t. It was no longer feasible to go down the path they were going, and they decided to lay off 100 people in November. These were not poor performers, or people who just needed to move on, or retire. These were beloved, respected team members who’d been around for years, helping to grow the business together. At the time, there was nothing about this that felt hopeful or “good.”
But we talked about a few things: how do you want to show up? How do you want to be remembered in this conversation that this person will remember—forever? And, finally, we talked about how resilient we are, that we can hold the space, with respect, for another person’s emotional response, and it won’t kill us, and we don’t have to disconnect. We can be present. We can show up, uniquely, as only we can.
What about you? What’s next? What if you take that walk, have that talk, run it out, or write in your journal? How do you want to show up? How do you want others to experience you? And most importantly, what is uniquely, unequivocally yours to do?
I hope you might work with me on your own clarity journey, and I’ve got my quintessential tools for the inspirational and the practical. See what resonates with you, and reach out to connect.
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