by Caroline Leach | Feb 28, 2021 | Social Media
We’re at about the one-year mark for our stay-at-home lives to stop Covid-19. There’s light of the end of the tunnel. People are wearing masks and socially distancing. Case positivity rates are dropping. More vaccine doses are becoming available.
And yet there’s also a sense of extreme fatigue. Time has taken on odd proportions. Days blend into nights. Days becomes weeks. Weeks become a year.
As I contemplated the month of March, a feeling of sameness crept in. All I saw on the calendar was work, work, and more work. Don’t get me wrong. I love the work. And I’m thankful to have it.
But life is not solely about work. It’s about people. It’s about enjoyment. It’s about the journey.
What was missing from my calendar were all of those times. Time with friends. Time for fun. Time to simply BE.
It’s time to take a break already. As humans we’re wired to work, play, and rest. When it gets out of balance, everything suffers.
What’s a fun break you will take today?
by Caroline Leach | Jan 31, 2021 | Leadership, Work/Life
Life can be endlessly complex, no? More technology, more commitments, and more goals and dreams. Layered over that is a global pandemic, climate change, social justice, and political polarization. It can make life feel especially heavy.
When overwhelm rears its head, as it often does, one question can help. It isn’t to imply that the challenges any of us faces are easy, or simple, or straightforward. But in any given moment, asking “what would made it simple?” can help you identify new ways to take action.
This blog is an example. I’ve posted to it each month for the last six years. There’s a phenomenon about “not breaking the chain.” Once you do something repeatedly, you accrue “check marks,” day after day, or month after month. As you rack up more check marks, it provides its own momentum to keep going. This is not my original idea, but it resonates with me.
So here it is, the last day of January. If I do not post to my blog by midnight, I will break the chain of 72 months of posting. Usually my posts are 500 or more words in length. But I don’t have 500 words to share right now. Life is busy and complex. So how can I make it easy? By sharing this question with you.
by Caroline Leach | Dec 31, 2020 | Change, Leadership, Learning
What do you share on social media when life is difficult? When life is even busier than normal because of pressures that come with living in the Covid era?
For me it’s meant I haven’t posted on social media as much in the last few months. In part it’s because my business is growing — consulting, coaching, speaking, and teaching — and I have more work to do. That’s a good thing. It’s a blessing in this environment.
Yet it also brings new pressures. How do I continue to deliver my best work? How do I scale my business to the next level? How do I automate certain processes and which ones?
The other part is just how difficult it’s been. The struggle. The juggle. The terror of wondering, day after day, will everything work out?
This part comes mostly from the steakhouse my husband opened in the summer of 2020, after two years in the making. The dream became reality, and Covid turned it into a nightmare. And we have lots of company in this strange space.
The good news is people love the restaurant. Tonight we’re delivering three times of the number of New Year’s Eve meals we estimated.
The bad news is takeout and delivery is not a sustainable business model. I understand why indoor and outdoor dining has been prohibited to help stop the spread of Covid. What’s harder is moving forward day after day when most of your ability to operate isn’t there, with 260 empty seats.
This has all run headlong into my guiding mantra to only share positive news and information on social media. My focus is providing insight and inspiration about personal branding, social media, and leadership that others may find valuable in their own professional lives.
Some words in a book I read this month crystallized the downside of this approach. “This is where we are now, endlessly cheerleading ourselves into positivity while erasing the dirty underside of real life,” says Katherine May. She’s the author of Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.
The dirty underside of life right now, for many people, is it’s really hard. Life is difficult. It always has been, but the last year has brought it into sharp relief.
It’s okay to feel down. It’s okay to feel discouraged. It’s also good to connect with others and ourselves to be with the reality, at the same time as we strive to improve upon it. The dirty underside of real life is present. And that brings new challenges. Many of them are outside of our control. But our response remains within our control.
In my case, my operational, marketing, and human resources skills are increasing exponentially because things need to get done at the restaurant, and I’m doing them, working with a great team my husband has formed. Setting the uncertainty aside, this “dirty underside” is also a huge period of growth.
So I’m consciously shifting my mindset, as a strategy to get through this. The reality is present and unchangeable and a huge bummer. What is changing is me.
Also, a year goes by in a flash. Next year has the potential to be very different. Although Covid is sadly spiking now, a vaccine is on the way. There is light at the end of the tunnel. We will all have new skills, experiences, and perspectives from this time that we can apply to the future.
How about you? What parts of your real life are you struggling with? How are you growing and transforming as a result? What will be different and better a year from now?
by Caroline Leach | Nov 30, 2020 | Social Media
As the adorable blue fish Dory said in the movie, Finding Nemo, when you’re lost and you don’t know where you’re going, just keep swimming.
That’s a great mantra for the strange and unprecedented year 2020 turned out to be. Everything is changing minute by minute. Change has always been in our lives. Yet before it was often imperceptible. Now, dynamic change sometimes feels like it’s happening every hour.
It’s in the shift to working from home, longer term. It’s in the shift in how we socialize virtually. It’s in practically every way we live our lives.
So if you feel lost, you’re not alone. No one really knows what will happen next. That can be scary. It can also open up a whole new world of possibilities. It’s a liminal moment — a transitional stage — where we’re betwixt and between the world as we knew it before Covid, and what the world will be like after it.
We still have agency in our own lives. We can pursue goals. We can connect with others. We can try new things. We can just keep going. What are you doing to keep swimming in this liminal time?
by Caroline Leach | Oct 31, 2020 | Leadership, Social Media
Is there hope on the other side of despair?
Yes, there is, says internet trend observer and investor Mary Meeker.
Mary and her team at Bond Capital released a report called Our New World in April of this year. It was about a month into our stay-at-home world to “flatten the curve” of the coronavirus.
The team “compiled observable trends that help form our views of the present and should provide insights into the future.” They are optimists, and rays of light are so welcome right now as we slog through this seemingly never-ending pandemic.
I added this report to the reading and discussion for the class I’m teaching (remotely) this fall at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. It’s called Managing Technologies for Digital Media in the MS program in Digital Social Media.
Here’s the crux of the report: “None of what we are going through is comfortable, or fair. And while things will likely get worse before they get better, has America, perhaps, just gotten the wake-up call it needed to get to a better place? Let’s hope so, and let’s find the best ways to get to the other side as quickly and thoughtfully as possible.”
Getting to the other side is the game we’re all playing now. What do we need to do to get through today? And tomorrow? And the next day? Many people are struggling with loneliness from quarantines. Some friends tell me it’s hard to get motivated or excited about much of anything these days. And many jobs have evaporated and many businesses are prohibited from operating at full capacity.
Our family restaurant, for example, is only allowed to use 10% of its available seats — the ones outdoors. If there’s any good news, it’s that we’re in Southern California and we don’t have cold winters like much of the rest of the country and the world. My heart goes out to restaurateurs in colder climates who are installing igloos to serve diners.
The phone rang last night near closing time after a busy Friday night of outdoor dining. The hosts had already departed. I eyed the phone warily, not eager to answer it after a long day of various work projects that started in the early morning hours. But I picked it up with as much cheer as I could muster.
“Hello,” the caller said, “I ordered takeout tonight.” Silently, I prayed that all had gone well. “I don’t usually do this,” the caller continued. “But I wanted to tell you our meal was outstanding.”
At this point I exhaled. And smiled. “Usually we think of takeout as being less than,” he said. “This was anything but. We have a dinner reservation in a few weeks, and we can’t wait to come in.”
Well, wow. Just wow. That someone took the time to call and share their experience and their thanks was something to be truly grateful for. It re-energized me late in the evening. I couldn’t wait to share the feedback with the team who had worked so hard to make the experience memorable.
This made me wonder. Are we all viewing life as “less than” right now? Something to be endured? A time to live in suspended animation as we collectively wait for “the other side” to materialize?
If the game we’re playing is getting through each day as best we can to get to a “new normal” (or whatever we’ll call our post-Covid world), how can we up our game? In my last post, I wrote about a feeling of progress every day and making note of what was accomplished. Often it’s much more than we thought.
To that, here’s a new practice to consider adding. What can we each do or say every day to encourage someone else? What uplifting words or feedback can we share, whether in a text, on a video call, or on social media?
Because our words might be just the thing that helps someone who’s feeling discouraged to carry on. To keep trying. To keep striving. To ultimately get to the other side.
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