Welcome to another week of the new normal. I’ve received some emails from people praising all the time they’ve spent with their family now that we’re all under shelter in place rules. Social media has been full of suggestions about what we can do with all this free time we’ve got on our hands. Am I the only one who hasn’t all of a sudden had more time to read or walk my dogs?
I’m pretty sure there are a lot of us out here feeling more pressure than ever before.
If we’ve got our kids home from daycare or school, then we’re trying to keep them studying, learning, praying they don’t fall behind, all while we’re either working from home or worse yet, not working at all.
If we’re still showing up on the job, and a lot of us still are, then there are all the extra precautions. We are changing our clothes before we join the family, maybe we are trying to live separate from the family and sleeping in the guest room, or living in the garage, trying to keep our families safe. For some of us, we can’t make that choice because we have to come home and care for our families.
Once you get past that, there’s the fear. The other night my husband was soundly sleeping while I lay awake. I heard him cough in his sleep. As I lay there in the dark, I wondered if I’d brought home the virus with me. He’d been home, isolated, for over a week, but I hadn’t yet started to work from home. There in the dark, I began to cry. What if my choice to go to work resulted in illness or worse for him? My heart pounded in my chest, fear beating at my ribs. I thought: What have I done?
Look, today’s situation is not what any of us wanted, but it’s the road we’re on now. Like every other situation, we have many choices about how we think, feel, and respond. It’s through mindfulness that we can start to pry out what our options are.
It’s been tempting to dump my original plan for this year’s blog, but I’m not going to. I believe the skills I’m showing you are as relevant today as they were a month ago. I’m going to use business examples and also examples from the pandemic. So here we go.
Let’s talk about the R-word: restraint.
We hate that word. We don’t like to be restrained in our homes, and we don’t like to restrain ourselves from overeating, box in our time, constrict our choices, or restrict our actions. We want to be free, baby, free.
Take a good, long look at the dog in the photo above. The harness and restraint are allowing the dog to ride in the car. Using the harness system, he can safely experience a world beyond the four walls of his owner’s home. So is it cruel to clip him into his seatbelt? I think most of us can see that it’s an act of kindness. It’s an opportunity.
That’s how I want to view restrictions- as gifts I give myself. One thing I’ve learned is this – you never figure out how to change anything in your life until you restrict yourself somehow.
Restraint opens up the gate to new ways of being, working, achieving, and sometimes, just surviving.
I think we all get how restricting ourselves in the short-term yields benefits in the long term. Don’t smoke today, and you’ll be healthier tomorrow, eat less today, stay home today… all of these restrictions yield a greater good tomorrow, for ourselves or our communities.
Here’s what we forget about restriction – and this is what gives me hope in this terrible time – being not able, or not allowing yourself, to function as you have been, is the fastest door to innovation and change.
Right now, we can’t get PPE the way we always have. Three months ago, if you had asked us how we would get it, I bet the answers you would have received would be the same circle of options – federal stockpiles, common suppliers. You wouldn’t have said Eclipse Mattress will start making and donating thousands of surgical masks. You wouldn’t have said – you know what, we’ll get them from Facebook and Goldman-Sachs.
Being unable to solve a problem the way we always have before is exactly what generates new ideas, new hope.
As the nation and every business owner on the planet tries to find ways to solve for the shortage of tests, the need for PPE, the need for ventilators, we can apply this same concept in our immediate lives.
For those of us trying to manage challenging schedules and increased demands, placing restrictions on how long we’re going to spend on a task, forces us to focus and come up with solutions that we wouldn’t even consider if just doing what we always did was an option.
You’ll see this in business when managers use restraint by taking opportunities off the table. It’s not an option to deliver after the deadline, now what? They might further restrict the conversation by saying it’s not an option to work ourselves more than 50 hours a week, so now what? How do we create the product without overworking?
At first, our brains resist this. It’s not possible, we think. We’ll have to work eighty hours a week. If we relent and allow ourselves to work that many hours, our brains are actually satisfied. What we believed has been proven true. We didn’t need to expend any effort on a new idea. Sneaky, huh?
To use restraint effectively, you have to honor that restraint far more times than you allow yourself to blow through it. You know this from dieting, from quitting smoking.
What we forget is: before we exercise restraint, we can’t yet see the how.
Before I quit smoking, I couldn’t imagine how I could get up, have coffee and leave for work without a cigarette. I literally, couldn’t think of how I might be able to do that.
Now that I’m tobacco-free for over 20 years, I see exactly how it’s done.
That’s the thing. You have to be able to believe in the future you can’t yet see, in order to accept the current restraints and start working on “What now?” “How next?”
You can apply this same thing to your current situation. For any obstacle you’re facing, your brain will offer you better solutions when you restrict your options. Keep taking the unpalatable solutions off the table until you find a solution that sounds good. Then try it. If it works, great. If not, the answer isn’t to go back to the unpalatable solution, the answer is to come back and look for another good answer.
If you want help working with these tools, schedule a free session here.
Restriction isn’t just a tool for
- Changing behavior now for a future goal (diet)
- Finding creative solutions to problems (when familiar solutions don’t work)
There’s a third use for this powerful tool. You can put restrictions on your mindset.
Laying there in the dark, feeling afraid was not the end of the story for me. I had a choice at that moment. Changing the past was out of the question; changing how I viewed my past was.
For those of you on the front lines, you are making choices every day. Do you reuse your mask? Do you walk off the job? Do you send your children to a relative? Do you speak out on TV about what’s happening? Do you go into one more room? Help one more patient? Do you show up at your register and or do you call out sick? If you’re in IT, do you go in and fix the machines that are needed by the folks working from home? Do you show up and ship things? Deliver things?
If you are a front line worker and need a safe space to clear out your thoughts and feelings, schedule a free session here.
For those of you laid off, you are making decisions about what to do with your limited resources.
All of us, we’re making decisions every day during a time in which none of us know what will happen next.
Here’s what you can absolutely restrict right now. You can promise yourself that you will not go back and condemn yourself for your choices. You can restrict yourself to making conscious decisions about what you’re going to do, why you’re doing it and then, no matter what the result is, you can commit right now that you won’t waste a minute using your choices to beat yourself up.
My team had a job to do. Part of that job was to keep showing up to work until we were sure that the equipment our company needed to be in place was set up. I am married to, and in love with, an at-risk man. I looked at the options, I took every precaution that made sense to me, and I did what I believed was right.
In that same situation, with no new information, I would do the same thing. So there in the dark, I had a choice. Was I going to lay awake and worry, blame myself and make myself sick over it or was I going to own my choice and stand by my decision?
Neither option was going to change the past. Neither option was going to make me a saint. I let all the recriminations go.
I restricted my thoughts to the present moment. What was happening right now? In the moment, we were both just fine.
And that? Was just good.