By Rachel Varrilly Gierula – Career Coach
… but it wasn’t.
Congratulations – you made it through January. Always the longest month of the year, this year it felt even longer. Lockdown 3, hopefully the Covid series finale, landed at the start of the month and with it we kissed goodbye to our mini-freedoms, got on with home schooling – or not, booked our home deliveries and hunkered down.
And yes, there’s a vaccine light at the end of the tunnel, but for most of us it’s a long way off. Navigating the next few months, after such a life changing year of full stops, starts, and stops will need to draw upon our last reserves of resilience.
How do you stay motivated to keep moving forward despite our world being so held back?
I spent much of last year delivering Positive Psychology workshops based on Shawn Achor’s work, The Happiness Advantage. The three key principles of the workshops are: Happiness is a Choice; Happiness is an Advantage; and Happiness Spreads. I did think that selling this message could be a tough gig in a pandemic. But it wasn’t, here’s why.
The one thing that most of us do have a choice about right now is mindset. And choosing happiness, or a more positive state of mind, for those who are able, is a positive mental health choice. And the learning that was reinforced for me as I hosted workshop after workshop was that, choosing how I approach a situation, how I approached the many iterations of lockdown, made a whole heap of difference.
Our Career Coach February blog content was supposed to be about heading back into normal and regaining worklife balance. Since we’re now in Lockdown 3, that would really miss the mark! Where we are right now, staying home, being apart from those we love, many of us having lost someone dear, is the reality.
So how can we apply positive psychology to this moment in time? How do we focus our brains on the art of the possible rather than our life restrictions? Perhaps we need to put a different slant on this lockdown…. How do we best use this time for good? We have another 4 weeks of significant restrictions, let’s choose to use it wisely. What learning have you been putting off for a while? What home project did you plan to start last year but didn’t get around to? What would your children love to do with you if only time was not an issue?
If you chose to view this lockdown as the gift of an extra 4 weeks of time, what would you do with it?
Our Career Coach is Rachel Varrilly Gierula, if you’d like 1:1 career development support, or interested in talking about business coaching for your team, contact her at LinkedIn.
For a full list of all our current vacancies, visit us as JS Recruitment.
