Leveraging hindsight to find a path forward
Looking back
I have always seen myself as someone who embraces change. For the span of my professional career, I seek out a new challenge every 2-3 years. In my personal life I’m always planning my next adventure or chapter of personal growth. Despite all of that, the past two years have been the most challenging ones I’ve experienced in a very long time. I recently put aside some time to reflect on everything to gain perspective.
Like most people, the events of the past two years introduced an element of the unknown and unfamiliar into my world. And, like most, I experienced my own personal “remix” of the experience, relative to my physical, spiritual and cognitive coordinates in the world. I had good days, bad days and ok days. I had sleepless nights. I had days where getting out of bed was the hardest thing I did. I laughed, I cried, I yelled, I retreated, I embraced.
The one thing that surprised me most about my own reaction to everything was that I leaned into the discomfort and surrendered myself to the change.
Gaining Perspective
Looking back, I wonder if there was even another way for me to respond. I know and saw that others did respond differently, but I personally could not use all of my usual tools for navigating change. I couldn’t look to past experiences to build from, because so much of it was new. Discussing the situation with others helped us feel less alone, but often left questions unanswered. Planning proved to be an exercise in futility.
In my reflection, I also recreated my personal timeline of everything that I did or happened in my world, and I’m so glad I did. I’m not one to ruminate but seeing everything that happened compared to the change I usually move through helped me give myself a break—both for how well (or not) I responded to everything and for feeling like I should be doing more.
Looking Forward
Now that governments and employers are starting to unwind their positions from the past two years, I’m finding ways to refill my cup and be myself again. I work best at the office, and only after a week and a half, I’ve regained my focus and clarity of mind. I’m feeding my soul by spending time with friends. I can make time and space for me without feeling like I’m turning my back on my household.
As I unwind my own position from the past two years and start to think about how I want to experience and be in the world, I’ve also taken a new view on stress. I happened upon Stanford University’s Rethinking Stress toolkit, which brought together the research about the impacts of stress, the approach of growth mindset, and prompts for personal reflection. Working through that toolkit had the immediate effect of changing my response to stressors and was also a poetic end to my latest 2-3 year chapter.
Through the past two years, I have dug deeper into my own value system and my outlook on life. What was important to me before became more important, and what wasn’t became noise for me to navigate past. And although the unwinding process will take some time, and we all know there is no “going back”, I’m hopeful this chapter in our history will set the foundation for a beautiful change—if we let it.
