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Many organizations are currently in the midst of “return to work” planning. After a year of a pandemic-related workarounds,  people are brainstorming about how to, once again, share space with colleagues and become liberated from endless hours on Zoom. 

While it’s wonderful that we can have these discussions (three cheers for vaccines!), it’s likely that some people on your team are thinking, “Return to work? What do you think I’ve been doing for the last 12 months?!” or “I haven’t been around another person in a year. Humans now scare me and I can’t even begin to think about this.”

The last year has been draining for each of us in different ways. When people are tired and wrung out, it’s important to remember that relaxed, deliberate discussions are vital to keeping working relationships strong while you’re trying to create new ways of doing things. There are a handful of questions you can ask to make a return to your physical workplace successful and to discover if now is the right time to do it.

Start by defining what “returning to work” means to you. Everyone on your team will have a different definition – that can lead to miscommunication and strife. Ask your team to share their thoughts on the term “return to work,” and create a common definition or come up with a different term all together.

Then ask these questions:

1. Why do this now?
   • Perhaps your implementation timeline is flexible, but you want to start discussing what work might be like if your organization defined “going to work” differently
   • You need figure out how to get back into a physical space because your organization depends on in-person experiences (theaters, restaurants, and so many others)
   • Everyone else is doing it… (this is not a great reason – let’s talk)
2. How do values relate to the “return to work” conversation?
   • This is a PERFECT and ESSENTIAL TIME to include the values and vision of your organization in your decision-making process
   • Make sure that choices about returning to a physical space support and are supported by clear, articulated values
3. How will you know if “returning to work” working?
   • Put metrics – objective and subjective – in place to help everyone see how this change is progressing; include a process for revisions (put safety first)
   • Remember to include time for readjustment – being around other humans may feel weird for a while
4. What if the way in which we work could be more delightful for everyone: the introverts, the extroverts, and everyone who just wants to love their workplace a little more?
   • In March of 2020 we proved that workplaces can be completely rearranged in a matter of hours – we can be wildly inventive when we need and want to be
   • It’s very possible that how we return to work can be more flexible, more engaging, AND more productive than we know

I’m here if you want a hand thinking about these conversations. Email me and we’ll chat.

Here’s to you and all the good work you do in the world.

Additional Perspectives

Here are a few articles that might help you think about what this next phase of what work looks like:

• Forbes: how remote work has fostered organizational resilience
• BBC: what does “productivity” look like now?
• Pew Research – so much data about how the pandemic has and has not changed how we work
• Washington Post: yep, Zoom fatigue is real
• And from me: go at your own pace – you do not have to crush 2021

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My approach this year is low-key because, as much as I love it, the date feels a little surreal. The last 52 weeks have wrung-out the collective psyche, and marching forth in a global pandemic has proved challenging in ways never imagined in 2020.

Trying to comprehend the past year’s grief and loss on the global scale is mind-boggling; experiencing that loss within our own families is heartbreaking. Work and home life have shifted dramatically, and we have had to reinvent and readjust from moment to moment. While our ability to reconfigure so much while being physically distanced and masked-up is a testament to the power of human creativity, it’s also been hard on the spirit.

But I’m nothing if not a fan of spirit resuscitation, so I want to remind you of the following: YOU ARE DOING A GREAT JOB. You’ve put one foot in front of the other for the last year through struggle and stress. And, even if it’s only felt like survival or frustration or exhaustion, you’ve been marching forth this whole time. Your fortitude is impressive and there is no need to do anything new unless you want to. But if you do, I say go for it.

Perhaps this year we need some additional ways to think about marching forth. Take these for a spin and how they feel:

1. March Forth – the classic. It’s full of aspiration, joie de vivre, and vim! I can hear the brass band celebrating you in the background now!
2. Keep Calm and Carry On – put on something tailored and tweed (at least from the waist up for Zoom), make yourself a cup a tea, and get to it
3. Just Keep Swimming – channel your inner Dory, and sing to yourself as you face your fears and move through the sea of uncertainty with the grace and memory of a goldfish
4. When in doubt, remember you can “begin by taking a smallish nap or two.” Winnie the Pooh’s approach may be your key to marching forth

Give any and all of these a try, and remember that there is no wrong way to march forth. Find your method and keep going. You’ve made it this far, and that’s pretty amazing.

Here’s to a good year ahead. Onward.

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I’m big fan of planning for success, giving encouragement, and tapping into whatever confidence you need to be a person you’re proud of. Yes, to goals! Yes, to enthusiasm!

And NO to “crushing” 2021. I get that crushing here is figurative – I’m not a Luddite. But I am incredibly aware of word choice and the tricky nature of the language of dominance that shapes our culture.

What’s in a Word?

I am tempted, momentarily, to begin a short treatise about the importance of non-violent communication in an increasingly divisive society. So, too, could I launch into a manifesto about language of The Patriarchy and its framework of control that continues to insinuate itself via all modes of media into everything from one’s psyche to one’s Zoom schedule. But here’s the specific question at hand:

Aren’t we all just a little tired of having to go and crush things? I am exhausted by the mere suggestion.

Saying “I’m going to CRUSH 2021” suggests that the year is something to be conquered, that there is only victory or defeat, success or failure. And crushing is so often used in reference to a person’s spirit. 2020 has done quite a number on many of us in that department, so why would we want to crush the potential of year that lies ahead?

Before you roll your eyes while cursing my attention to word detail, the word “crush” can be wonderful. We need the verb “to crush” for fruit so we can make delicious wine or for flower petals so we can create exotic perfumes. The noun “crush” is equally delectable – that tingly, steamy rush of infatuation when smitten with someone dreamy.

It’s not the word, but he context that chafes. What if we really examined what we are trying to express when saying, “I’m going to crush 2021”?

Consider these questions:

1. How do you define “crush the year”? Do you use terms like accomplishment, tenacity, financial reward, or personal development?
2. Are there points for partial crushing? What if you discover that you wanted to change direction or add a level of nuance to the crushing that you didn’t know about at the beginning of the year?
3. How will you know if you have crushed the year? What are your markers of successful crushing? How will it make you feel?
4. Will anyone, including yourself, be harmed in the crushing process?
5. If you know what successful crushing looks like, is there any other word that might be more descriptive and less dominance-focused that could be used instead?

And if you really want to crush 2021, by all means do. My aversion to crushing the year is not likely yours. But just ask yourself if “crushing” accurately fits your aspirations.

Here are a few alternatives:

1. I’m going to feel deeply proud of myself and my actions in 2021!
2. I’m going to make creative decisions and use my resources well throughout 2021!
3. I’m going to use my intuition and skill to make choices I can celebrate every day!

If you could look back and say that you had accomplished any of those statements in 2021, how would you feel? How much confidence would you radiate and share? I suspect that if more of us framed our hopes for the year ahead with that kind of clarity, we’d feel better about how each year transpires and, ultimately, have a better time in the process.

And then there would be no need to crush anything other than the grapes for champagne to toast our successes in the year ahead. Cheers!

*I always wait until March 4^th for such things. More about that here.

This post appeared first on ALifeOfCharacter.com

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For those of us who are not artistically inclined, the question “Who raised you?” is akin to “Who are your influences?” It’s a question that helps the person asking get a sense of your backstory. Most of us will answer in relation to who fed us and housed us when we were young and leave it at that.

But the people who do the functional care and up-brining of a child are not the whole story – not by a long shot. Friends, teachers, teams, clubs, neighbors, art, and stories raise us, too.

Back to the Beginning

Over the last several months I’ve been shuttling back and forth between my home in Massachusetts and my homeland in Michigan. Because of the pandemic, I’m sharing a house with my mom in the town I grew-up in. I’m just three short hours from my dad and my stepmom, too (In the Midwest three hours is basically the same as dashing to the grocery store in Boston).

Being back in Michigan has reconnected me to the people who raised me and my influences. I was raised by my parents, yes. They influenced my general disposition and values. They are compassionate, intelligent, emotionally engaged people, so I feel like I struck gold in that department. But I was also raised by my neighbors. The neighborhood I grew up in was wonderful: all the parents watching out for all the kids, all the kids watching out for each other, a tangle of people who shared a community of friendship and support. Each of those parents and kids helped raise me. They provided kindness and safety, creativity and love, education and structure, food and play. They made sure that I was included and known as a part of the tribe. I helped do the same for them.

The people who raised me are also friends from grade school and high school. They are my mentors and colleagues from my working life. Each of them informed my style and my sense of humor, my ethos and my interests and helped me discover which values were mine and which values were not.

The Things We ARE Like

And there are the less tangible elements: those often dismissed as things we like rather than things we are like. I can honestly say that Katharine Hepburn, Diego Rivera, Rosalind Russell, and Kay Thompson influenced my values and choices as much as some of the “real” people in my life did. That’s because the core elements of their art – the characters they created – hummed with qualities of character that are inspired by the truth and joy of human spirit. Whether those qualities were courage, playfulness, tenacity, intelligence, poise, or self-reliance, the character traits I saw in their art made those qualities easier to identify in the people around me. They were sparks of inspiration that helped me shape my own manner of navigating the world.

The individuals and ideas that influence us help us do the complex work of becoming grown people. Whether your list is reverent and familiar or quirky and surprising, the elements that influence your choices and values are the things that shape your character. They are worth remembering and can keep you steady if you feel like you’ve lost your way. They are the nudges and winks that help you recollect the things you love about each day. And they are the inspiration that help us raise others.

So, tell me, who are your influences?

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Yes. Especially if we want to grow.

There is a certain rigor that we seem to lean toward when discussing our values. It’s a sense they should be absolute, perfected, and unyielding. While values like integrity and kindness often reverberate throughout our lives, other values such as ambition or temperance may shift in over the course of a lifetime.

We all have and use aspects of every value – honesty, joyfulness, tenacity, fortitude, curiosity, and so on. They are part of the human condition. But they each have different meanings and weight at different times in our lives. Circumstance or desire might bring them into sharper focus or make them more necessary during changing phases of development and experience.

As an example of how our understanding of values develops over time, think about how you learned about fairness. If you learned about fairness associated only with strength, power, and discipline, a restrictive or rule-bound concept might have been formed. If, in addition to those values, fairness was also joined with curiosity, hopefulness, and compassion, you may have a very different experience of what the value of fairness looks like in action.

When and How?

How might this relate to how our values can shift or change over time? Let’s use a pal of mine: a kind and well-educated white male in his 60s. His values include tradition, accuracy, and discipline. He is open minded and politically liberal, but this year’s civil unrest and necessary focus on racism in our country had him flummoxed and sounding like he might start yelling, “Hey, you kids! Get off of my lawn!” His perception of how things are “supposed to be” in relationship to his values were colliding with the news and the dawning realization that his perception was incomplete.

That discord within himself was remedied when he attuned to the depth of his other values: curiosity, grace, compassion, and connection. He values justice and learning. Those values are more influential than tradition and discipline. Compassion has emerged as a center point – for others as well as himself – as he develops his own understanding about the experiences of people of color. His value of accuracy is more strongly paired with curiosity to evaluate whether his old views are beneficial for the current time.

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

-W. Edwards Deming

His values haven’t not “changed,” but how he makes use of them has. His understanding has changed and evolved to meet this time and to help him continue to become a person he is proud of. That is no easy task. Change requires tenacity and perseverance and willingness. It can be very uncomfortable. But growth rarely happens without effort. And this is maybe the trickiest part of how we develop character. Our culture has had a pretty simplistic view of “having values.” They are discussed as something to possess like a car or a college degree.

But that’s not the point of values. They are not something bequeathed or inherited or possessed just to leave on a shelf. Values are to be lived with and used. Our job as people is to reflect on our values regularly and evaluate when and whether they are helpful and beneficial throughout our lives.

Knowing your values and how they relate to you and the person you want to become takes consistent effort. It can sometimes feel like a drag: the never-ending slog of reflection and adjustment about everything you do, every day, in context of your values, forever… But the experience and the result is deep self-knowledge and pride in your actions and thoughts.

We each get to use all of our values throughout our lives to change and grow. We each get to decide what we want our character to become.

this post originally appeared on ALifeOfCharacter.com on September 6, 2020

photo by Photo by Lesly Juarez on Unsplash

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This post was originally published on ALifeofCharacter.com

By Laura Crandall

How intuition and self-esteem brought me back from burnout.

I was supposed to be over-the-moon happy. I’d just completed the biggest thing on my List of Things That Would Be Wonderful To Do: 

I’d graduated from Harvard. 

The idea first emerged when I was 16 and beginning to think about college. But now I was old: I was 38. I’d followed a dream 22 years in the making and graduated with a master’s from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I’d risked a lot to do it. I’d quit my job, sold a house, moved to Cambridge, and immersed myself in full-time academic rigor. I was proud of what I’d accomplished, standing there with a smile on my face and a diploma in hand. I was also a shell of a human being.

Part of why I decided to go to grad school when I did was that I had been dissatisfied with my work. I was on the edge of professional burnout: tired, frustrated, unable to focus, and disinterested in all of it. I thought the remedy was to hit the gas and go to grad school. The problem with flooring it when there is no fuel in the tank is that I was clinically burned-out by the time I graduated. I don’t mean I was just rundown or needed a long vacation. I mean I didn’t have a neuropeptide to my name. My blood-work showed it. I dropped weight, I was anxious, and I cried constantly. While I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression, I’d argue “Total Depletion” is a better term. My internal resources – energy, interest, spirit, focus, will – were gone, and I felt like a wraith drifting through the ether.

I knew I was in a bad spot, so I just did what I could to take care of myself, even though everyday felt like moving through sad and heavy molasses. I asked people for help. I tried to eat well. I ran and did lots of yoga to keep some semblance of serotonin in my bloodstream. I was going to therapy and meditating. I was journaling and doing all of the self-care a person can imagine. I moved in with friends who were, on most days, simply helping me stay upright. And during all of this I was still trying to be creative and productive. I’d just earned a graduate degree from freakin’ Harvard – I was supposed to be able to do fabulous and important things.

But I’d stopped sleeping. The insomnia was devastating. I’d just go lie down from time to time and hope for the best. I had always been a champion sleeper, so I tried to remember what sleep was and hoped my body would find its way.

One afternoon I was lying on my bed just staring at the wall, not sleeping. I was trying to remember how to be the gregarious person I had been a year before. I was trying to remember all the things I knew to be true about being a compassionate, smart, and self-aware human being. I remembered that I knew those things, but I couldn’t figure out how to use any of that information. 

Then a vision appeared in my mind’s eye along the wall of my bedroom: it looked like a pegboard, one you might see in a workshop. All of the tools that I’d gathered in my life to date were on that wall. 

Tools for confidence and clarity. 

Tools for courage and health. 

Tools for discovery and learning. 

Tools for joyfulness and play and high hilarity and throwing epic parties.

And I couldn’t reach any of them. They were all too far away. All I could do was lie there and see them. Then a clear thought emerged with a slow wash of calm as this sentence came to me: “It’s okay because you have faith in yourself.” It was a statement of absolute certainty. It was not an encouragement or a wish. It was a fact and completely true. I wept with relief and I slept.

I was so relieved that I could finally see my tools. They were out of reach but they were there. I knew that I had developed them with intent, over time. I knew I’d be able to use them again.

In the moment of sensing all of my internal resources so clearly on that envisioned pegboard, I reconnected to what I have come to believe is the single-most important thing a person can have: faith in one’s self. I knew it from my bones to my hair to every inch of my aura. I had faith that I’d be able to reach those tools and be able to make good use of them again. I knew I would eventually become revitalized. I didn’t just hope for faith in myself – I had it. 

What is your intuition based on but you having faith in yourself?

The feeling was different than self-confidence. I’m a fairly self-confident person. Some days that looks like “fake-it-’til-you-make-it,” some days it’s just being willing to try and fail or goof, and some days it’s just doing the best you can with what’s around. Self-confidence makes walking around in the world a little easier. Faith in myself felt different. Even the phrase “faith in myself” feels linguistically inaccurate in context of how we typically use that idea today. 

What it actually felt like was “I have faith inside of myself about the being that is me.” The faith I felt was sacred. It was also not a sense of “I can do this” or “I know I can buck-up and save myself.” On the contrary. It was a softer sensibility that let me know I was okay on a very profound level. It allowed me to see myself in that depleted space with incredibly high esteem – self-esteem – and clear intuition. In the moment of seeing my tools I was no longer struggling to feel better. I just knew I would feel better one day. It was a gentle lightning bolt of hope when I had been at the edge of despair.

The process of recovering from burnout is as different for people as the ways and circumstances in which burnout happens. For me the process of shifting from being fully depleted to mostly restored happened over the course of about four years. And that was fine, even though it was also sometimes agonizing, frustrating, and sad. 

It was fine because I had faith in who I was and who I had become in my heart and my spirit. I trusted myself and knew I was up to the job. It was an exercise in being present for and with myself every day. It was also a process of reconnecting the severed aspects of me – body, mind, and spirit – that the fully-intellectual environment at Harvard had done such an adept job of keeping separate.

That culture demands that people prove and justify themselves and their thoughts, ideas, and aspirations with intense scrutiny every single day. In many ways it probably should – intellectual and scientific rigor are vital for an informed and prosperous society. But it mistakenly communicates to its community that there is little room for the deep wisdom of the body and the spirit, for the pieces that connect us to the larger, joyous world. Without all of those elements in communion with one another, we can be disconnected from our tools, our sense of faith in ourselves, and from our character.

Today, 11 years later, I feel so lucky to be able to write this. I am glad I went to Harvard. I’m glad I lived to tell the tale. The moral of the story for me is this: there is no real need to separate any part of ourselves because the dominant paradigm thinks we should. It’s not good for us and it’s not good for the dominant paradigm. Trying to fix burnout by becoming busier and more stressed is a recipe for pain. How might I have thrived differently had I stayed connected to my intuition while growing into my academic life? How might I have helped someone else if I had been able to use my self-confidence to connect to my self-esteem? I don’t know. But I hope that this post helps you today.

 

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