This PESKY Pandemic !
Blame everything to this pesky pandemic, almost everything in our lives have changed the past year. Our worlds have not only turned topsy-turvy, some of our worlds even turned upside down. Suddenly, a big number of the workforce are out of jobs now and while in the Third World, that impacts basic needs for food, in the western world, there are equal earth-shaking tremors with mortgaged houses are now on the line.A year after the floodgates of this pandemic did break out, still, this is no time to cry on spilled milk. This IMF piece @ https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2020/12/rethinking-the-world-of-work-dewan.htm?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery highlights how this 'pandemic is accelerating a shift toward more informal and precarious work'. And what woke me up in this IMF piece is that blunt statement that we need to 'seize this emergency as an opportunity to build a resilient, equitable and sustainable economies'. This is no less akin to that analogy of looking at a half-glass of water as half-full [and NOT half-empty !]. We need to seize these moments regardless if all these seem to be emergencies in nature. Let's turn garbage into gold, losses into wins.
One too many real life stories that keep our eyes wide open. Pilots who are now plumbers. Flight Attendants now offering home-cooked food in front her residence. Businessmen whose businesses were hard hit shutting down business. Billionaires who used to be awash with $$$ but are now scampering for 'rescue plans' to extricate them from enormously ballooning operating losses, think of the travel industry, the hotel industry, lots of them being really hard hit by this pandemic. And this is NO longer an IF but rather a MUST-DO. We MUST re-tool. We MUST upskill. We MUST scale-up. Get out of your comfort zones. Enough of your touted expertise from your past credentials. If you need to re-invent yourself, please do. if you need to ramp up with a 'skills makeover', go for it, and go for it PRONTO, now. To share with my readership, during this pandemic, I completed online courses for FREE [e.g. Harvard Business School, University of California-Berkeley, Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wharton Business School].
Of course we've got to live with the realities of life now. Those RT-PCR Tests, if they are part of health protocol compliance, let's not go around it because that protects us in the first place. Indeed these are inconveniences but c'mon, let's face this, let's do embrace these realities. Any recalcitrant out there, you don't deserve to be reprimanded with kid's gloves. Despite this pandemic now being hardwired as part of our keyboards, go through Alice Boyes' piece at Harvard Business Review @ https://hbr.org/2021/01/be-kinder-to-yourself as even espouses for 'compassionate self-talk' where she strongly underscores the four elements of self-compassion wherein it is theorized that sometimes, this self-compassionate talk leads to 'reframing a trait or tendency' [akin to perfectionism]. Boyes goes
further that this can lead you to a more balanced view of yourself and do see things 'when not everything is great'. From Kristel Van der Elst from the MIT Technology Review @ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/26/1008962/how-to-plan-your-life-during-pandemic-covid-strategic-foresight-opinion/, it's akin to a covid survival guide 101 that runs as follows: 'CLARITY YOUR GOALS, CONSIDER WHAT FUTURE YOU MIGHT FACE, IDENTIFY the IMPLICATIONS, MAKE YOUR ASSUMPTIONS and REVIEW your OPTIONS, PLANS and OPTIONS'. Lastly, and this is humbling, Boyes says 'BE HUMBLE ABOUT YOUR ABILITY TO MANAGE IN THE MOMENT'. Well said indeed.✂
