Five questions to help us reorient our perspective, change our mindset and thrive in seasons of chaos and change.

Are you doing better or worse than you were doing a month ago? 

Here in Illinois we are well into week seven of our time of quarantine, with no real changes at least through the end of May. That means we still have several weeks to go. But in the last week or so, I’ve seen a definite shift in the sentiment on my social media feeds, especially Facebook. It seems like so many posts in my feed have moved from “this is how we are handling life in quarantine” to “I’m so over this.”

I’m not sure if this shift is due to the expectations we each brought to this season, or if it’s simply a sense of restlessness, or something else. But I’m not the only one that has noticed this shift.

I recently saw a poll on a friend’s feed asking a similar question to the one above. Roughly two-thirds of respondents indicated that they were struggling more now than at the beginning of this quarantine journey. 

Is that true for you? Have you considered why?

I definitely have my off days and my days that I struggle (hello yesterday), but I find that on the whole I am doing better than I was doing at the start of this. It’s made me wonder if this has something to do with the fact that, while new, this pandemic journey feels vaguely familiar. 

There’s a post that has been shared many times on Facebook in the last few weeks. It talks about how what the entire country is experiencing right now is essentially what military spouses experience on a regular basis. Birthdays and anniversary celebrations get cancelled…it’s challenging to plan ahead or anticipate the future…you can’t spend time with friends and loved ones anytime you want…etc.

The first time I saw this post, I thought, “Oh, that’s a nice sentiment.” However, the longer this shelter-in-place continues, the more I’ve thought, “Maybe there is something to this.”

Maybe not everyone is quite as used to the government interrupting their plans as I am. My birthday is in the summer and we usually move during the summer, so I’ve already had plenty of birthdays with no one to celebrate with. Maybe some people are experiencing this for the first time. I’m currently trying to figure out where we will be living in the fall and where I should register my kids for school. Maybe someone has never had to consider where their kid will go to school or if we will all be homeschooling again in the fall. Maybe all of the things I have experienced up to this point have helped prepare me for this situation. 

Change your mindset, change your life

In many ways this does feel very similar to what I experienced two years ago when we first moved here. I didn’t know anyone. Taking an 18-mo-old and a 3-year-old out in a new town by myself was hard. It was impossible to take them out to eat. I felt very isolated. 

It was really this experience two years ago that kicked my passion for personal growth into high gear. I realized that I was tired of being frustrated and disappointed by my circumstances. I was tired of letting it dictate how I felt. I was tired of seeing my family take the brunt of my less-than-ideal self. I didn’t want to live this way anymore.

Instead of letting my circumstances and my emotions reign, I wanted to bring life and joy to the people in my life. I had to change the way I responded to my circumstances, because I was going to continue to go through seasons of change and seasons of difficulty. 

I needed to change my attitude and my mindset.

So I did a deep dive into personal development. I focused on what I needed to do to get emotionally and mentally healthy. I started listening to podcasts. I started reading books again. I started finding ways to take care of myself so that I could take care of the other people in my life.

Freedom to choose our response

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl writes that forces beyond our control can take away everything we possess EXCEPT our freedom to choose how we respond to a given situation. We don’t control what happens, but we do control how we choose to feel and do about what happens.

He writes, “Even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by doing so change himself.” Frankl goes on to suggest that we respond by finding meaning in our challenges and by fundamentally changing our attitude toward life. 

The events that happen to us are simply facts. However, we can direct our thoughts and actions.

Entrepreneur Hilary Rushford has developed what she refers to as the “WAND” method towards to directing our thoughts and actions.
W – Whereby I think/believe __________ (the thought)
A – And thus feel _______________ (the emotion)
N – Next I do ___________________ (the action/behavior)
D – Delivering the results (outcome)

In other words, we develop thoughts or beliefs based on the facts and these thoughts lead us to specific emotions or feelings. When we take action on a feeling it then leads us to a specific outcome. 

What happens when we reverse-engineer that process?
We can change the direction of our “WAND.”

For example, if I am feeling overwhelmed, then what is causing that overwhelm? Yes, my circumstances may be overwhelming, but what thought do I have in response to my circumstance? This is too much? Or God’s got this? Is there a thought or belief I need to change so that I experience a different emotion/feeling?

“This is a marathon, not a sprint”

Let’s just start with the fact: We are in the middle of a pandemic that has upended almost everyone’s sense of “normal.” No one wants this. But here we are.

When this quarantine first started, I wanted to believe that we would all stay home for a couple of weeks and then get back to “normal” life. My more “hopeful” scenario is that we’d spend 6-8 weeks at home and that the girls would be able to go back to school for a couple weeks in May. 

But I realized that the most realistic scenario was that we were done with school for the year. I looked at the numbers and the historical data from the Spanish Flu and realized that we were potentially looking at 12 weeks of social distancing. 

And so, at the very beginning of all of this, I told myself this: “This is a marathon, not a sprint.”

I’m not really a runner, but I assume I could use adrenaline to power through a sprint if I had to. Running a marathon is a different story.

The same is true for life in the time of Corona. For a week or so, I can power through and do all the things – take care of the kids, work early in the mornings and late at nights and stay on top of my workload, clean the house and keep everything in order. But in order to do that, I sacrifice my routine, my health and my well-being. For a week or so I can ignore my feelings and my stress levels and not deal with the anxiety it’s causing. But it’s not sustainable.

Rather if I approach this as a marathon, then I need to figure out a rhythm and determine what strategies will help me maintain a positive attitude and outlook for the foreseeable future. I need to adjust my attitude, my actions and my behaviors. 

The thought that this is a marathon helps me realize that this journey will be challenging and long, but that it is an opportunity to learn and grow. I can do hard things. There is meaning and good that can come from this situation. 

From theory to practice

I would love to tell you that this process is easy and that I have thrived throughout this entire quarantine. 

But I’ll be honest and say that practice is always more challenging than theory. We as humans are complicated and our thoughts and feelings are complicated as well. As I described here, the process of personal growth often requires us to dig deep to understand the true source of a feeling. It involves a reckoning and a rumbling.

So despite telling myself to think of this as a marathon and despite reminding myself that God is in control and that I have been through stressful situations before, I still really struggled the first few weeks.

I experienced a lot more anxiety than I anticipated. I realized I needed to take a deeper look at my anxiety and the thoughts and feelings that I was experiencing. 

Once I analyzed my attitudes and behaviors and shifted some things around, things got a lot better. I also made sure I was doing my best to maintain a healthy morning routine. 

Questions to change our mindset

Here are five questions that really helped me and continue to help me reorient my perspective.

What emotions am I experiencing and what thoughts and/or beliefs are contributing to these emotions?

Perhaps it’s an emotion that simply needs to be acknowledged as such. Or perhaps it’s an emotion that’s indicative of something I need to shift in my thinking. Or perhaps it’s an indication that there is more going on beneath the surface. For me, I realized that unresolved trauma from a health issue when I was younger was adding to my anxiety. 

Are there things within my control that I can change about my situation or my thoughts about the situation?

For me I could change the amount of media I consumed on a daily basis. I could prioritize listening to podcasts that help me focus on growth and a healthy mindset. I could be even more intentional with starting each day with gratitude. I could focus on maintaining my schedule as much as possible. And eventually I even ended up shifting my workload and reprioritizing things at work.  

How do I want to show up and why? 

Over the last couple of years, I’ve pivoted from focusing on what I want to accomplish to who I want to become and the legacy I want to leave behind. What specific impact do I want to have on those that know me best? To the world at large?

I want to show up as someone that is approaching this time as an opportunity both to grow, to continue to move toward my “becoming” goals, and to give encouragement to those around me. Because regardless of how long I live, I still want to be moving towards my goals and not paralyzed by fear. 

But beyond that, my why is because I’ve seen how working on myself affects those around me, particularly my kids. 

At the start of shelter-in-place, my kids really struggled. Like most kids they thrive on routine and want to know what is going on. They’ve typically always been the kind to need to get out of the house every few days. If we are at home for too many days in a row, I notice a change in their demeanor. We all start going a little stir-crazy. 

So the adjustment period was too be expected. But I also realized the more that I was anxious and struggling, the more my kids were feeding off of that. As I adjusted my thoughts and emotions, my kids did better as well. Yes, we all still have off days. My girls still talk regularly about missing friends at preschool and they still regularly pray for the germs to go away and people to stop getting sick. But on the whole they have adjusted to our new normal pretty well.   

What do I want to take from this season?

I want to be careful with this question because I feel like it’s easy to ask this question and then start comparing ourselves to others. Am I doing as well as so-and-so? They are accomplishing x-y-and-z, why am I not? Am I behind because I have not __________________ during this time?

Each person will answer this question differently because each of us is at a different place in life. So the question is not what other people are doing or learning during this time, but what is one thing you want to walk away from this season with?

Perhaps it’s just knowing that you can do hard things. Perhaps you have a chance to spend more time on a hobby or passion project. Some of us will clean out closets and attack to-do-lists. Some of us are still struggling greatly and a victory is simply making it through a day without yelling at our kids. I think each of us can find a take-away, a learning point, a purpose, a meaning in this season if we search for it. 

Decades from now our children and grandchildren will be asking about this moment in history. What do we want to say?

Where do we go from here? 

My analogy of this being a marathon kind of falls apart here because there is no defined finish line. There is no special medal that we get for surviving life in quarantine. And there is no “return to normal.” Because normal as we knew it probably won’t exist for a long time.

It will be weeks, months, maybe years before life looks like it did before. But it’s also worth asking the question, is that the life I want to return to? Was it fulfilling? Was it meaningful? Did I have the time for all the things that truly matter to me and to those closest to me? 

Embrace this opportunity to explore what changes you want to make to life going forward. 

Pre-COVID I was simply stretched too thin (I was working on that), but the thing that continually got placed on the back burner was spending time with friends in person. Now that I can’t go out with friends, I’ve realized how important that time is, and I want to make it a priority moving forward. 

Some changes will be made for us. Not every restaurant will come back. Perhaps a lot of retail stores will shutter their doors. The way we socialize and do work and live may shift. But this is not all bad. We can choose to embrace and fall in love with change.

We have received a great gift, if we choose to look at it that way.

Bonus Question: What will you do with this opportunity? 

P.S. If you are struggling, I definitely recommend spending more time with the first question. Reach out to a friend, a loved one or a counselor to help you navigate this. Especially if you’ve never faced anything like this before, it is hard. But we are better together. So reach out. Please don’t struggle alone.