10 Questions to Inspire You to Re-Write Your Re-Entry - Part III
“Let’s get back to normal!”
Does hearing that make you cringe? Give you pause? Or, perhaps give you mixed feelings? For example, yes, let’s get my kids back into school for everyone’s benefit, but I don’t want to go back to a long commute every day or the over-busyness of modern life.
With the “new normal” upon those of us lucky enough to have access to vaccines, we’re offered a unique opportunity at a unique moment in time. At a transition point like this when our old patterns have been disrupted, it’s a perfect time to recraft your world, to start to build new structures and new habits for yourself, your family, your work world. This liminal time is better than a fictitious new year’s day transition. We naturally will be starting new behaviors as we re-open, so why not turn them into the behaviors, habits, and structures you can conscientiously create for the life you want?
What would it look like to re-write your re-entry on your terms?
To start from a blank slate? To craft what you want? To create your new normal?
Here are 10 prompts to help you define your re-entry your way:
Your Good Life Vision. To re-write your re-entry on your terms, you need to first know what your vision for a good life looks like. To build a sustainable life, you need to tune in to what you want. It won’t be sustainable if you are living someone else’s dreams or should’s. So start here.
1. Define success for yourself and your life. In this moment of reimagining your world, take ownership of what success looks like to you and define it on your terms. Look at what you WANT and GET to do and who you WANT and GET to be, rather than considering and anchoring on societal should’s. Ask: What would I want to do to feel successful and fulfilled in my life? Who would I want to be to feel successful and fulfilled in my life? Then, consider how you could measure that success. For example, it could be committing to having an evening meal for an hour every day with your family, because you value connection and being a good parent.
2. Get clear on your values. Take the time to better understand what you value in your life and what’s important to prioritize, and then define what those values mean to you. If you value creativity, learning, or family, for example, what do those specifically mean TO YOU. Creativity might mean that you want to be able to have time to master your musical talents as a hobby. Learning might mean that you always want to have a challenging project you are working on. Family may mean maintaining a deep connection with your parents and siblings. These values show up and look different for each of us, so it’s helpful to define them for yourself.
3. Envision your life with your definition of success and values in mind. What does it look like to live according to your definition of success and your values? Where are you putting your attention and your energy? What’s present in your life?
4. Learn from pandemic living. As this article suggests from Arthur Brooks in The Atlantic, take advantage of what this momentary pause has given us, a new experience that holds learning for each of us. Consider, what from during the time of the pandemic do you want to carry forward with you? What from during the time of the pandemic do you want to put down and leave behind?
Time Shaping. The often said adage goes, “If you don’t manage your time, someone else will.” It’s true and easy for outside demands to claim our time without us even realizing it. So, it’s worth investing in planning how you can shape your time in alignment with the Good Life Vision you created for your life and to shape a more sustainable way to live coming out of the pandemic.
5. Know where your time goes. Do you currently know where your time goes? If not, I recommend you track your time for a period. It’s not something you have to do forever, but gaining information about where your time goes is power. Tracking your time can help you get a better handle on what’s capturing your attention and whether or not you are spending time aligned to your priorities and your Good Life Vision. Without knowing where your time is going, it can make it harder to start to shape your time and not let others’ agendas drive you.
6. Set your pace. A common theme at this time is the aversion to going back to our modern pace of constant busy-ness. To break the cycle, one has to be realistic about the pace at which they want to be leading their lives and managing their careers. Be honest—do you want to be in the fast line, middle lane, or the slow lane? There’s no right answer, and there’s nothing wrong with being in any of them. Some people run at a faster pace and want to be in the fast line, because they are jazzed by their life and work. Others may be balancing work and family so want to be in the middle lane. Others, especially now, may be in a state of recovery because of recent demands from work, caregiving, or general life circumstances. What’s most important is to be honest about what you need in your life right now and what you want your life to feel like. Then plan and shape your time accordingly. Note that you are likely going to have to make choices. What will you cut from your list? What will you allow yourself to be bad at? What can you schedule out to another season, if you will?
7. Determine what you need to sustain you. Get clear on the non-negotiable, must-do activities that you need to have as part of your day, week, or month that will keep you operating at your best. For example, I must exercise in the morning. Or, I must meditate for 15 minutes to reset myself in the middle of the day. Or, I need to write for 30 minutes in the evening to reflect and process the day. I need to get out into nature for an extended period of time each week. I need time with my closest friends each month. Or, I need to attend at least one of my children’s activities each month. Whatever it is, get clear on how you will fit those in and have back-ups. Ideally, put these sustaining activities on the calendar first and work to create habits that can bring these into your life without struggle.
Work Craft. For most of us, work takes up a big chunk of our time. So, let’s go beyond job crafting to work crafting. Job crafting is about aligning one’s job to what best works for the individual to get more satisfaction out of work. Work crafting should be about crafting your work structures to better align with your holistic life to get more satisfaction out of work and life. With companies figuring out how we’ll be headed back to the office, take this time to think about what works best for you for more work-life fulfillment and have a voice in shaping what the Future of Work looks like for your company or organization.
8. Accommodate more of your life. On The Sustainable Ambition Podcast, Christine Bader shared how modern work structures often don’t leave enough room to accommodate other aspects of our lives. It’s true—many of us are essentially slaves to our work with little time left for the personal. So, what would it look like to renegotiate your work structure to accommodate more of your life? What would it need to look like? What can you ask of your employer or reset expectations for yourself if you are self-employed?
9. Create more ease. Many of us think we need to slug through our work lives or have bought into the power of grit. There’s nothing wrong with working hard, but does it always have to be hard? What if we were to challenge ourselves to bring in more ease. Ask yourself, what could my work structure look like to bring more ease to my life? Then, what do I need to ask for to create that ease at home and at the office?
Learning Loop. Our lives aren’t static, nor do we always know what will work for us. That will be the case as we re-enter the world and renegotiate our lives at work and at home. So it’s important to add a learning loop to this process so you can learn, grow, and evolve what works for you over time. From the prompts above, you should have a sense of how you want to use your time, what you want your life to feel like, and the structures you need to support your vision. Get clear on what you want to prototype.
10. Try and refine. Put your ideas into action and establish a check-in point. Pick a time now one quarter out and put an hour block on your calendar to evaluate where you stand with your practices and their alignment to your Good Life Vision. How are you feeling about the use of your time and your pace? Are your work structures supporting more work-life fulfillment? What’s working? What’s not working? What do you want to keep doing, stop doing, and what do you want to try next? From here, what do you need to re-negotiate at work, at home, and with other people in your life?
Many of us are cautioning to take it easy as the world opens back up. Will you heed the call? Will you realize you have choice in the matter? Will you use your voice to ask for what you need? I encourage you to carpe diem, seize the day to shape them in the way that will allow you to show up as your best self as we step back out into the world.
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