HOW DO YOU MAKE LIFE WORK FOR YOU WHEN EVERYTHING IN IT TELLS YOU IT CAN'T?

I had a really interesting conversation with an online member over the weekend about his life which and what's going on for him which lead me to the conclusion on three different things.

- The effects of Covid-19 are still hitting our workforce hard whether we care to admit it or not

- No one ever loses their fire, they just need the right match

- There are those out there that burden more than others and carry the weight of things some of us will never know or understand.

The conversation actually struck up when I was doing my routine check-in with our members. I send out a certain amount of text messages each day to find out how our members are going and if I can help in any way. I was met by a reply which instantly encouraged me to call him which I did. We then spent the next hour talking about his daily work and personal struggles. His work informed a group of staff members that they would no longer be needed when the wage subsidy extension finished up, he wasn’t one of them but now he has to pick up the workload which he’s already struggling with currently. He’s been going out a lot because of this and his training has gone out the window. His confidence is also shot because he’s let himself go and he doesn’t know how to get back into it.

This is where we did a simple exercise I’ve done many times before with members to help them identify the issues coming up for them and making them work for them. It’s a 3 stage process and I thought it would be valuable to share as others might be going through this as well.

The first stage is Recognition. Now, this may be pretty straight forward but for some, this is extremely hard. He could see the issues coming up for him but what I wanted him to recognise was the emotions and traits that arose when these things came up. Anger, frustration, helplessness, fatigue, directionless. These were but a few of the things that came up for him when I asked him to recognise how it was making him feel and how he was reacting.

We then moved into stage 2 which is the Reconcile stage. Balancing things out so we see both yin and yang of how he can react to the situation. This was an amazing experience. It really brought out some true emotions and it helped him realise why he was in his job doing what he was doing and then why he wanted to get fit and healthy in the first place.

After this breakthrough, the last stage was really easy to talk about and plan, this is Repetition. Identifying the things that brought up emotions that he didn’t like and creating triggers to instantly switch his mindset from negative to positive in an instant. This act will only work with constant repetition. Like building a habit, the constant attention to the situations and the way he can snap out of it will become second nature to him in a matter of months and it will influence the rest of his life.

You can either choose to succumb to the struggle or rise to it. He chose to rise to it and he’s encouraged me to do the same!