Manage Your Pandemic Mindset….
Hi There,
As I shared in DRIVEN’s September blog article, I’m in a state of Liminality. Full disclosure: I didn’t even know there was a word for what I was feeling until I received the recent daily message from Fortune’s Ellen McGirt. If “Liminality” is new to you as well, consider McGirt’s description:
“Liminality describes the space between two states of being. In anthropology, it is the middle stage of a rite of passage—you’re no longer exactly who you were, but you’re not yet what you’re going to become…”
The subject line of her message was, “Welcome to the new never normal.” Well, that sounds a bit defeatist! So, I’d like to take to liberty to reframe.
I’ve been thinking of the stages of our pandemic as a recurring “next normal”. I interpret how others say, “I can’t wait until things get back to normal” as a desire to stay static in time— a destination. But this is clearly impractical, as Covid-19 continues to evolve and iterate, and no one can anticipate the path it will take.
Here’s what I do know: Humans enjoy a sense of closure. We become restless in the “messy middle”. I get it! For example, I’ve been binge-reading certain books lately to avoid suffering the suspense of what will happen to the characters with whom I so deeply identify. In the case of Covid-19, I don’t think anyone is rooting for this to meander and linger.
In life, until we take our final breath, we are experiencing the middle. So, let me offer a new way of thinking: We are each on our life’s journey, perpetually in the act of becoming. We will never experience a new “normal” because that construct has been an illusion all along. It indicates an arrival, a static time, which is simply not real, until death.
I urge you to reject the idea of settling on “normal”. When you consider that you are “in the becoming”, a world of possibilities opens up, energizing and enabling you!
Try it out. What do you want your next normal to look like? What are you in the midst of becoming? Where will your becoming take you?
Cheers!
-Deborah
Deborah Goldstein
DRIVEN Professionals / Forbes / Linkedin
info@drivenpros.com | LinkedIn
DRIVEN Professionals, 35 Adrienne Lane, Garrison, NY 10524