The Coronavirus sends us all to a retreat
Usually, in a time of crisis, we need to be active in the doing mode, fighting for our existence. However, in the current situation, we need to pause, to stop and retreat from the busy life we know. The COVID 19 pandemic situation sent us on a retreat. Retreat means consciously pulling back from any distracting external activity to focus inward, as we focus as much as possible inwardly. An invitation to turn our attention inwardly, and enable clarity. It is obvious that we didn’t choose this retreat. However, we can gain from this situation that was forced on us. We can use this time of slowing down to rethink our path and our actions to experience more flow in our working life. Meaning, investing minimum energy and gaining maximum results.
So, how can we move toward acting from a flow experience, and investing minimum energy and gaining maximum results? By simply deepening our listening inwards to bring the most out and bring our accurate and precise added value to the business world.
In these times, it’s important to listen to the various voices that exist within ourselves. The various emotions can be sadness, sorrow, doubt, confusion, feeling of ambiguity, and more. Our ability to enable all these kinds of emotions to exist within us, without suppressing them and at the same time, not letting them manage us.
Over the years, we learned to disconnect from our feelings and emotion because of the fear that these emotions will flood us and we won’t be able to control and manage them. However, the price of disconnecting from our inner world is relatively high. The ability to turn inward and connect with our hearts is crucial to be able to connect with our creative parts and qualities like courage, creativity, and compassion. If we disconnect from our emotions and feelings, we will lose touch with our human qualities which is what differentiates us from robots and machines.
Hence, what is required of us nowadays is to slow down and to increase our mindfulness. The Coronavirus came to stop us all; leaders, business owners, and individuals, to readjust our value proposition with respect to ourselves, our customers, community, and environment. Even if right now we all feel unsettled by the situations and for some of us, being forced to go to unpaid leave or even being retrenched, this is also a hidden opportunity.
An opportunity to pause, reflect, and listen deeply. What is the new opportunity that wants to emerge? And to dare to ask ourselves and our teams challenging questions, what is our added value to our customers? What do our customers need from us in this period? What is our passion? What is our purpose? And how can we create our next service, product, or improve/upgrade the existing one to bring the most value to our surroundings? Is there an alignment between my/our values and what I am doing? And if not, what do we need to do to close the gap?
Another question we should reflect upon is how we work. The situation has caused us all to work from home. We see that it has a lot of benefits: increased efficacy, less waste of time in traffic jams, decreased pollution, more time at home with our families, among other things. The question we should ask ourselves is, is the office worth the money we are investing in real estate, or can we embrace a new, more flexible way of working, working remotely from home at least for part of the week? Can it also enable better integration between work and home? Beyond that, another question we should reflect upon is whether we can act in better harmony with the environment and nature? When we develop the next product or service, we need to take into account the way it affects the environment and nature?
The change is here to stay, and it came to move us all from the old reality to the new reality and to enable new patterns to emerge and for new opportunities to evolve. Even though it’s not an easy time, our ability to pause and listen and act from this deep place of listening can enable us, leaders, business owners, executives and individuals to gain maximum results with minimum investment and to work from a place of meaning and enjoyment for the higher good.
