As Winston Churchill once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”  My coach asked me 3 great questions to help me learn, grow, and steady myself during this time.  Hopefully, these questions can help you and your people, too, so we can use this pandemic to our advantage.

Even though we’re all in the same boat, our experiences of this crisis are so personal and individual that we each need to discover for ourselves the lessons we are learning. My go-to ways to learn about myself are spending time in nature – thank you Toronto ravine system, taking pen to paper, or talking things over with someone. Talking things over is what great leaders make time for. It’s called coaching.

Here are three questions my coach asked me to help me explore what I’m learning now: feel free to write them down to use with your people: “What is life like for you right now?” “What are you learning about yourself these days?” “What values do you need to reconsider and shift?”

Here is what I’m discovering: That I have too many limiting sacred cows about what success looks like for me.  Typically, I’m a striver, which often shows up as searching for new and more – not as in more stuff, I’m not a shopper, but as in new challenges, more learning, more clients, new projects, more travel and new adventures.  This Pandemic Pause has revealed to me that what I really want is to strive for less – less running around, less feeling of overwhelm, less noise, less pressure, less hours of work, less travel – at least for now.  And, because including less in my measure of success is new for me, I’ll forget this lesson again and again. So I’ll need to remember to keep circling back to it, to ensure I’m in integrity with what I say yes to and what I say no to. My coach can help me here, too.

I invite you to consider what you need to learn, and what your inner work is, so you can use this crisis to your advantage.   Leaders, ask coach-like questions. Be curious about what is changing and shifting within your people, so they learn to grow and steady themselves as we continue to be pushed around during this crazy, weird time.  You got this.  You can do this. Bye for now.