It's been a challenging year.
Covid-19 magnified psychological issues for people who were already hanging on by a fine thread. Working with clients over the last year, I really noticed the importance of managing our expectations.
Expectations can guide what we would like to get from our time in work, goals set for the weeks and months ahead in our sport/pastime, or even how things will go at home. They can, however, go against us if we set unrealistic and overly rigid expectations.
There are various ways this can happen. This year, in particular, one has kept popping its head up during my work. Lots of us have expected the same level of performance from ourselves as before Covid-19. Now do not get me wrong, it's essential to keep our standards up as best we can and not just give up. However, it's also vital that we take all the variables into account.
Let's look at it straightforwardly—input versus output. Before I go into it further, please remember, this is just a general guide and a place to get us thinking about things. Let us compare our "performance" in 2020 to 2019. Our input that year was a few weekends away, some gigs, games, lots of nights out and maybe a long holiday plus lots of other things like catching up with mates or trips to the cinema and shopping centres.
All "normal" stuff for us pre Covid19. All done without much hassle or thought about what we were doing. That year's output would have been relatively high, from goals in work to issues in our personal life. Skip forward a year, and it is almost like we were expecting the same output as the year before. Our inputs for the year were way off though. We didn't get any of the holidays, hardly any nights out, but it seems like we expected the same outputs.
Of course, we know things are different now. The news has been there to remind us that not seeing friends and family was and still is so difficult to take. But it's like we don't really appreciate the gravity and real effect lockdown has on our health. It's almost like we don't listen to ourselves.
Can you remember those times as a kid when we would ask for something, and our parents just did not understand or have the time to slow down and listen to us? Some of you who are parents now probably know why they found it hard to slow down. Us kids often found it so frustrating. "Why aren't they listening to me? Why can't they hear what I'm saying? Why don't they understand what I'm saying?" That's almost the same thing that's happening within us now.
Our subconscious is screaming out to be heard, but our lives have become so busy for lots of reasons that we just can't listen to it. So how do we listen to ourselves more? Simple, slow down. Hearing this can let us understand that maybe it is not all that "simple", at least at the start anyway.
Look, I'm not saying this is going to just "fix" everything straight away. Quite frankly, it's not. What it will do, however, is make a start. Put a little crack in that wall of hopelessness. That's all we need, just a small gap. As Leonard Cohen said, "There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in", and you know what? He was right (1).
So, do what you can. Make an effort. Show yourself some respect. It's not about getting it right the first time, it's about your reaction after you've failed to thrive. What are you going to do now?
Be good to yourself.
Be kind to yourself.
