5 Ways to Reboot Yourself and Your Team Amid COVID-19 Crisis
The current trends would indicate that we are not in a post-COVID environment. Many signs point to increasing cases and the potential need for scaled shutdowns or more to control the continuing spread of the disease. Regardless, we have all experienced a life-affecting event over the past three months. The virus may continue to rage on, but there is a need to push forward with life and business. As of this writing, a large percentage of businesses have reopened and some level of normalcy was trying to prevail. To assist in looking ahead and what the next steps can be, here are five ways you can complete a reset for yourself and your team.
Create an updated vision story for yourself or your business
Now is a great time to take an inventory of where you are and what you stand for. For many people, the time to reflect or a complete shift in daily activities has caused a need to update what they are working towards in life, in their business, or what is most important to them. Updating your vision statement for either yourself or your business is an excellent way to capture this. Often we hear more about vision statements than the term I have chosen to use here, vision story. Most of our ideas, ideals, and passions cannot be captured in a statement. That implies a shorter, pithy description of your vision. There is more to it than that. It is the story we want to tell people about who we are, what we stand for, and how we go about achieving it. Finally, it is a description of what it looks like when we are living our vision.
Complete a KISS Activity - Keep, Improve, Start, and Stop
An excellent way to restart is to complete a KISS activity. We tend to think of these just at the beginning of a year or only in business terms, but taking some time to think about what could be different is very helpful. Since many of our routines changed completely in the past few months, we may find that we don’t want to return to everything we did or had in the past. Your list of ‘keep doing’ items might look very different from what it looked like in January. Improvement may be centered around something you have just begun doing due to the coronavirus changes. Honing those skills or activities could be a way to find new efficiencies or outcomes in the future. Perhaps there are some new things to start doing based on those shifts and changes. And, I am sure everyone has found some things they would like to stop doing. Taking some time to assess these areas can help identify some things we may have taken for granted in the past or call out new actions that we either want to improve upon or ensure we don’t continue.
Pick a Learning Topic and Research It In Depth
Based on your new vision or some of the learnings from your KISS activity, diving deeper into a new subject may be a great way to bring either of those things to life. Researching is a hard practice to get into if you are not used to it. I still struggle mightily to really focus on certain aspects of proper research. Good research is not as simple as a couple of google searches across the web. Finding new perspectives and connecting old ideas with new ideas helps to define a clearer picture of the subject you are studying. This is an excellent skill to have as a leader. It will assist in building important critical thinking skills, allow for fresh ideas to emerge and refine your everyday ways of thinking and behaving. Research can be fun as well as rewarding. (And yes that is as much a reminder to myself as a recommendation for anyone else.)
Schedule a Reboot Day
Set aside a day where you can relax, catch up on some sleep, and just do fun things for yourself. Many leaders in retail have had to jump right back into a changed world and the pace is likely faster than it was before stores and businesses closed in March. In other cases, you may not have had a break at all and it has been crazy fast for three months straight. Find a day that you can disconnect and decompress. Plan it as if you were going on vacation so you can have that one day to relax and recharge. Taking a week-long vacation may still be a ways away, but a day feels a little more doable in the near term.
Take a long walk
If you cannot take a vacation or even dedicate a full day yet, try a long walk. Schedule yourself for an hour or two to just walk outside and be alone with your thoughts. Limit your distractions - which might mean walking in silence. Or if music helps you reflect and think, use that. I would recommend writing down three to five things that you want to work out in your mind ahead of time. Then throughout your walk refer back to your questions/thought starters to make sure you can work through them all.
The last several months have been unimaginable. That can mean many different things to different people based on the experiences you have had. But no one could have described ahead of time what we have seen, done, and continue to live in now. With businesses opening, new challenges arising, and a world that is still filled with uncertainty, now is as good a time as any to take some time to reflect, analyze, and reboot for the coming weeks and months ahead. And perhaps this will become a necessary practice every quarter to help assimilate to the changed and evolving world we currently find ourselves in.
What are you going to do to reboot yourself?
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