What are the best resources for resilience? When you are feeling low – where do you go? To whom or to what do you turn to? There are some great resources out there to help pick you up, re-energise and re-focus.
Certainty of outcome: Right now, we are in such a unique moment in time. It feels like the whole planet is on the same page, or at least reading the same book. Sometimes, as with a riveting book, I’d love to sneak a peak at the last few pages. Seeing how this plays out, and when, would provide everyone with some certainty. It would probably give a lot of people a level of comfort and let them relax into it a little more.
However, just like every book or movie, we won’t know how it ends until we get there. We need to live through the twists and turns with resilience knowing there is an end and it will be fine.
Perspective: Looking back four months ago, you may not have realised how amazing your life was then. As I wrote recently, we often don’t know what we’ve got til it’s gone. This is probably one of those moments for a large portion of the population in so many countries already.
Feeling low – Where do you go?: To re-energise or re-frame things, some of the best tips I have, that work for me are: Going for a run, writing something positive in a journal, listening to a favourite couple of songs rather loudly and singing along, or writing what’s on my mind to ‘get it out’.
A great book to read, and write in like a workbook, is Dale Carnegie’s classic, ‘How to stop worrying and start living’. It’s got some incredible stories in it and great lessons and tactics to use too.
Helping Others: If you can spare a minute, please answer the question, ‘Feeling low – where do you go?’. Click on the title of this post and scroll to the bottom of the page and leave your best tips in the comments.
With readers from across the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and dozens of other countries, maybe we could get a little compendium of top tips listed. It could help people, from around the world, to better deal with the new normal.
Knowing that you may may have helped someone get through their day will pick you up too, and hopefully leave you smiling.
If you expect people and things to be perfect, then you may be in for some pretty big disappointments in life. If you are starting with perfect, every other outcome is, sadly, going to be inferior.
I find my own frustrations rise when I use the word ‘should’. It’s a funny word. It’s how we think things ought to be based on our experience, desired pleasure and avoidance of pain. So why should any of us get to decide all on our own how things should be? Be careful if your base case is always starting with perfect. Especially if it is your particular view of perfect.
Jim has so many brilliant sayings. Search for him on YouTube, Google or click here.
Should is a word we gently encourage our children to use less and less. Unless they are going to take action and push for the change themselves, then that is fine. In which case, the word switches from ‘should’ to ’must’. Tony Robbins is known for saying that we don’t get our ’shoulds’, we only get our ’musts’.
If you think everything should be different, you will find life to be a constant battle. But, if you can accept that nothing is perfect, you will thrive. All those imperfections create diversity and uniqueness. It can be amazing, if you let it be.
It would be nice to be able to solve all the problems in the world with a snap of the fingers. Yet, if you simply do what you can, you will have done more than most people do in a given circumstance.
We can easily talk ourselves out of doing something because we don’t think it will make a massive difference. However, by doing what we can, it might. Making an impact can happen in so many ways. It is difficult to foretell which of your actions will make a significant difference and which won’t.
On that basis, I suggest you do the following.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I think most people like to think that they think their own thoughts. But beware, you’re being influenced. Your thoughts are not always your own.
Thinking can be hard and confronting. Understanding a point of view and dissecting it without emotional baggage, bias, or stereotype can be a challenge.
I’m from the school of thought that people make emotional, instinctive decisions immediately and then search for data to confirm their point of view. It probably stems from millennia of survival instinct conditioning. Beware of anything that is different, as it could harm or kill you. Assess it and look for data that may or may not be right or wrong or even useful.
However, often you will look to find data that confirms your emotional decision. That emotional decision will be based on your prior experience, especially from when you were quite young. So this feedback loop becomes quite self-reinforcing if you are not careful.
Oftentimes people start only following one newspaper, or a collective of sources that all view things a similar way. This seems normal because it can be quite comforting to read things that are in line with our view. Though it is not a great substitute for thinking.
Sometimes content producers try to lead you down a road that isn’t helpful in general, but does suit their personal bias.
Think about this. Really play with it in your head. Are you actually critically thinking things through with your own thoughts, or are you letting someone tell you what they want you to think?
I enjoy a thought provoking exchange. Especially if it is in pursuit of really understanding something or solving a particular problem. It is important to check your intent before you engage in discussion. Are you arguing to win, convince or prove your point or are you engaging to improve your depth of consideration and thought?
Don’t let me influence you though. Think for yourself. Challenge your thoughts, biases, misconceptions and understanding. Consider this when consuming your normal news channel, newspaper, online news, social media, etc. Have you become, comfortably numb?
Stuffocation, minimalism, the KonMari Method. It’s all there to get you to Declutter: Get it out!
Education phase:
Quite a few years ago, I found myself quite deeply involved in a decluttering phase. I was reading books, watching videos, and listening to podcasts. My days were focused on practicing the techniques and getting rid of things that I was inadvertently collecting.
I noticed that the minimalists had the right idea as far as bringing stuff into the house was concerned. The best thing to do was not to bring new things into your home. The only exception was when you knew exactly where you were going to put them.
Changing Habits:
Well, my newspaper and magazine habit had been thinning out for years before this anyway. However, now I would gather even fewer of them in a month. I also committed to throwing them in the recycle bin before I entered the house. By doing so they couldn’t lurk on a table or other surface for weeks.
If I did not throw it away on my way in, I would give myself three days to read or recycle it. If it wasn’t important enough now to squeeze it into my day, when will I ever make the time. The merely interesting must be binned quickly. The compelling will have time allocated.
Sort for Joy:
The ‘Declutter: Get it out!’ types also had a key message. Bit by bit, get rid of it. Sort out a drawer to get some momentum. Then maybe a cupboard.
As Marie Kondo would suggest, the item must bring you joy if you are going to keep it. I was a little sceptical of the term at first, but now I use it all of the time to weed things out at home and also at the point of consumption. Does it bring me joy.
Tips toward success:
Anyone who has ever been on a diet will recognise this truism: It is easier to keep it out than get rid of it later. So if you are going to put significant effort into decluttering (or weight loss), focus on being a disciplined minimalist when it comes to consumption.
One of the best tips came from the minimalists. Take a picture of the thing and then give it away. For most things, the picture will be enough to bring back the memory of the item, event or time.
Now may be a great time to declutter and give your space a little Spring clean. You’ll feel amazing clearing out a drawer, cupboard or whole room! The whole process can be quite liberating. Good luck with it!
(fyi, if you found the Coronavirus Exit Strategy post compelling, you may find its follow up article worth reading. It considers the next 2-3 years living like this, under lockdown, and some alternatives. Find it here.)
I read a friend‘s Facebook post this morning where he noted we were in the middle of one of the greatest periods of uncertainty. Are these uncertain times? I should rephrase that to, ”Is it any more uncertain than usual”?
I believe I understood what he was saying, and on the surface I agreed, but it got me thinking.
Yes, probably most of us feel uncertain about the future right now and where this whole crazy situation is going to lead us. Though is that uncertainty any different from March 2019? Or are we simply more aware of the uncertainty?
Life is entirely uncertain. In the future at least.
There is no certainty around when you will meet your perfect match or fall in love. We don’t know if today we will get a call from an old friend, have a heart attack or fender bender, or find a £5 note on the ground.
We pretend there is certainty in our daily lives. We might like to think our lives are stable and not changing. But it is an illusion. We have our routines and expectations which help keep us calm and help us to believe there is certainty. Though, at any second, that routine can be changed by an external factor: Good or bad.
I think we live with constant change and constant uncertainty. Fortunately we don’t usually think about our future as much as we do right now.
Coronavirus Exit Strategy: Use empty hotels to develop Herd Immunity
Stopping this market meltdown, and the fast growing financial and social challenges, requires two things:
1. Making livelihoods our absolute focus (while still saving lives impacted by Coronavirus and managing hospital beds) and
2. Providing a clearly defined end date to this situation. This can be done by immediately starting to develop herd immunity by creating a Government Organised Voluntary Infection (GOVI) programme, for healthy people, in all the UK’s empty hotels
The Problem:
The market, and people generally, require certainty so they can move forward confidently. Currently there is no certainty when considering the end to this pandemic*. Hoping for a viable vaccine provides no certainty. It is like hoping to win the lottery: It’s worth trying, but don’t count on it as your only strategy.
The Solution:
We need a clear, time-bound exit strategy that can show progress is happening and has a clearly defined end date. A GOVI programme would do both.
GOVI explained:
While people are self-isolating in this Suppression Phase, we can roll out a government organised voluntary infection (GOVI) programme at designated hotels (all UK hotels). The GOVI programme would be similar to the idea of chicken pox parties, where healthy children would get together with an infected child and get infected to be done with it. If 50%-80% of the healthy 6-60 population are going to get the Coronavirus at some time anyway, with mostly mild symptoms, why not get it over with?
For WWII, people volunteered to fight in the war effort knowing that there was a significant risk of death or serious injury. These recruits were checked for being in good health (i.e. no underlying conditions) and then sent off to battle the enemy. With more than 700,000 (mostly empty) hotel rooms in the UK alone, the government could pay hotels to host people who are 20-50 years old, and with no underlying conditions, who volunteer to contract the virus under supervision. They would get checked out by a GP, and if ok, they would go to a government designated hotel where they would contract the virus and stay in the hotel for 7-10 days, until ‘immune’. The volunteers are then checked/tested by a doctor before leaving the hotel to confirm their immunity. Once immune, the volunteer gets a document and badge noting that they can re-enter society.
The government would need to authorise and organise this phase to maintain a controlled spread of the virus. They would need to set out the plan of action, acknowledge the challenges and risks involved and call out for suitable volunteers.
GOVI benefits :
In theory we could have c.700,000 very low risk people gaining immunity every 10 days. Over the next 12 weeks (84 days), we could have roughly 5 million people gaining immunity. This could be happening while the 70+ group and the Underlying Condition (UC) group are protected through self-isolation. Additionally, we could continue to have strong social distancing/lockdown policies in place (Suppression Phase), continue testing and encourage scientists to search for and progress a possible vaccine: all concurrently.
It’s more Churchill D-Day then Chamberlain “Peace for our time”. Let’s take the battle to the enemy rather than try to avoid the inevitable. Advance on the enemy rather than simply shield the citizens from harm.
A war time army of volunteers is required and I believe many would be willing to do this. Since there seems to be an overwhelmingly high recovery rate for healthy people aged 18-50 (99.7%), let’s get it and get on with it.
The ever-growing Immune Army can then help high risk people, relieve care workers, support hospital workers and others, or just get back to work. Ever more volunteers will spend a week in the designated hotels until huge swathes of the population are immune.
Within one year, about half of the young and healthy population (25 million people) in the UK will be immune, without having overrun the NHS. In 2 years, most under 70’s and those without known underlying conditions would have immunity (c.55 million). After communicating this plan, normalcy will start to return in weeks to months, demand will return, markets will stop the slide and maybe reverse, and the world can start to mend.
Summary:
Without creating certainty with a credible exit strategy, the markets will continue in meltdown, workers will be laid off, industries will collapse, and the government will have to finance the entire economy, possibly for years. Adding a GOVI programme in parallel to the other strategies/phases being employed, could greatly improve our chances of saving the most lives, from all causes. In addition, the GOVI programme will also put a floor in the economy with a certain and time-bound exit strategy, which will stop the markets sliding. Finally, this additional strategy could save billions of people from suffering through the severe, drawn out, Depression era future that the trends seem to indicate we are heading for.
Link to Mervyn King on CNBC, on Monday, referring to no viable exit strategy, from minute 8:45 to 9:20 (so 35 seconds long).
* Link to Mervyn King on CNBC, on Monday, referring to no viable exit strategy, from minute 8:45 to 9:20 (so 35 seconds long).
FIND MORE DETAIL:
I have added several follow up thoughts for you on my blog website page called Coronavirus Exit Strategy: GOVI. Points covered consider the next 2-3 years and our options. I’ve also added some sources and supporting detail,
‘Rock Star Dies in Tragic Accident’ was the headline I saw 20 years ago while I was walking past Richer Sounds and heading to London Bridge Tube Station. I tried to decipher the headline.
I knew instantly that this death was not of someone I had ever heard of. Had they been sufficiently famous, the newspaper would have put their name in the headline. Jagger Found… or Elton Tragedy… or something like that.
I tried to guess who it could be. I didn’t want to buy the paper to find out. I new I would find out eventually from the tv or a friend if it was sufficiently big news. When I did find out, I don’t recall ever hearing of them.
It was a pivotal moment because it made me really focus on how I assessed what people said and what the media led with as their headline. Since that time, I have always enjoyed playing my own little game of decipher the headline. I enjoy trying to decide whether something is going to be truly important or a waste of time, based on the headline.
You can save a lot of time as you develop the skill of quickly deciphering what the underlying message or motive is to any communication. Sometimes I nail it and sometimes I don’t. But I always enjoy playing the game. If you enjoy mysteries, psychology or solving puzzles, you may like to give it a try.
For some, this is a great time to take stock and think through what they truly want to do in this life. For others, it may have become so crazy busy that they don’t have a moment to pause and think about anything other than the next government announcement and its implications.
Without all the usual kids activities and appointments to arrange and get to, some people may have a few extra minutes (hours) in their day. Or maybe you no longer need to “get ready and commute”, so you may have a little more time now.
For those of you with a little extra time, this is a great opportunity to consider what kind of life you want to look back on when you are 85 years old. What do you want to remember when you are going through your photo albums or chatting to friends or younger relatives. Life flies by quickly, so don’t delay.
Block out an hour in your calendar on a day this week. Be specific with exactly what hour and day it is. It is an appointment with yourself. Then, when that time comes, do nothing else other than reflect and write out a list of things you would love to do, be or have in your life, between now and 85 (125 if you’re already well up there).
Just write all the things that come to mind. Ideally you will do an electronic list which you can save and sort out later on. But it could also be written on a sheet of paper or in a journal. You can always take a photo of it and file it on a device for easy finding later on.
The list does not have to be realistic, believable, conventional, exciting or anything really. What it should be though is a specific list of things on your mind and in your imagination. It could be things like: Spending two weeks on a golden sand beach in the Caribbean, helping your grandson learn French, walking on Mars, writing a funny novel, buying some art from a local artist, becoming a pilot, writing a letter to a loved one, collecting rare stamps or watching The Bucket List (enjoyable movie to get your thoughts flowing – good for most kids too).
This list-writing can be a challenge. Some find this exercise easy and some difficult. Either way, I suggest you do it. Now is a good time. It will give you a focus on things you are looking forward to, once we get life back to something approaching normal. It also helps you clarify what is important. Have fun with it.
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