Redefine How You Add Value
Hey Grown Women,
One of the core principals of Grown Woman Life is that grown women leverage life’s lessons.
We have experiences positive and negative, that serve to evolve our knowledge, behavior, character, and approach. I believe growth can only happen if you are acknowledging these experiences and trying to capture the lessons in real-time. This is my way of sharing my lessons with you!
The Situation
Admittedly, I am a bit over the number of emails, posts, etc. that are connected to the current Covid-19 crisis. But I would be remiss not to acknowledge the pandemic has forced us to pivot quickly. We have been forced to learn to:
Socially distance
Self Isolate
Deal with layoffs or decreased hours at work
Work from home
Homeschool children
Homeschool while working from home
Care for senior members of our family with new concerns
Communicate virtually
Drive our businesses under circumstances
Manage finances differently
Navigate a new terrain for shopping for basic
Change our we interact with friends and family
Manage fear and anxiety
Deal with stir crazy
In essence, we have been thrown into #coronacrazy!
Personally, I have found the time and energy required to work through things that I would typically just act on automatically to be exhausting.
The Struggle
I have found myself getting to the end of the day, and questioning what did I accomplish? That is because I measure my value by being productive and working on value-based activities. The fast-paced change and constant evolution of a global pandemic, doesn’t always allow me to measure productivity according to my nice, neat, normal scale. Life is messy.
A colleague of mine was frustrated because she prides herself on providing excellent customer service. She feels that the way she is doing this has been taken away because she is working differently to accommodate her family situation. This adjustment might cause a small delay in her response time to inquiries (we are talking 4 hours at max). My question to her was, did that compromise the value she was adding to clients? The truthful answer was no.
Another colleague of mine who prides her self on being SUPER professional was in a panic. She was afraid her child might be seen or heard in the background while she was on a conference call. I suggested to her that as long as her child wasn’t completely disruptive, she might set a positive example by just sitting her son on her lap and carrying on. Her son is SUPER cute, and he just might also make people smile. Allowing others to see that it’s okay to work differently might be the highest value she could bring to others.
The Reality
We put a lot of pressure on ourselves because we often have unrealistic expectations of how we add value to the world. Besides, as life evolves, we don’t usually take time to pivot purposely.
I would like to encourage you amid the #coronacrazy to take a breath, pivot purposely, take a moment to redefine how you add value to the world. You’ll find some plays in your playbook you never imagined.
The Realization
There is a line where the pressure we put on ourselves is positive. It allows us to perform to a certain standard that is aligned with our values and goals. However, more often than not, we cross that line by adding expectations that are unrealistic and not really about adding value or leveling up.
The Lesson
Amid the #coronacrazy, we all need to take a breath. Allow yourself the time and space you need to think. Then determine how to pivot purposely. We need to take a moment to redefine how we add value to the world.
I bet if we do this, we’ll all find some plays in our playbooks we never imagined.