Envisioning the Post-Pandemic World

This last weekend I attended a group coaching session to envision the post-pandemic world. It was very insightful and I thought I would share some my insights from the session.

Trying to peer into the future while still swimming, or floundering, in the murky waters of the pandemic can be really tough. We might still be too mired into the present and entangled with the thoughts and craziness of the last year. For me, I wanted to get myself out of thinking of how bad things were and take a peek at what life would be like once we all got out of pandemic times. Thankfully, it was an uplifting experience to be in that session and it came with an unexpected result.

As we went around the group, the unexpected result was the realization that there were already some amazingly positive aspects to the pandemic!

Some of these for me were:

1. SF Bay Area traffic is amazingly light! Pre-pandemic traffic was building to frustrating levels, clogging up highways and local roads. Now you can get anywhere in the Bay Area in record time.
2. The entire group somehow was composed of introverts. So we all enjoyed being *away* from everyone else and not feeling like we needed to see anyone in particular.
3. Pandemic times has shown us that we actually have a lot of free time, once we get rid of all the other stuff that occupied our days. It showed me that I really didn’t need to do all the stuff I filled up my days with. Now I have time to do the things that are really important to us.
4. Pandemic times also has increased the time spent with family, which we may not have had in the past. College kids are home and our kids are in distance learning on Zoom. They cannot go out to hang with friends, so we are always spending time together. Such a precious time!
5. Following on 4, I did note that I was glad to get my kids back in school! Elementary aged kids really have a tough time on Zoom learning. Once I got them back to school via a private school running pods, that further freed up time during the day to do things I could not.
6. We talked about letting go of “shoulds.” In pre-pandemic times, we often felt like we “should” go out with our friends when asked, we “should” participate in the school’s PTA, we “should” do this or that. Well, guess what. We don’t need to do any of that! Wow what a realization!
7. With all the insights above came the realization that we could now determine what was really important lives and what was not. We now have time to spend on ourselves and focus on what was truly important.
8. So now, the question for all of us was, how do we take these during-pandemic positives into the post-pandemic world? For me, the first aspect was reflecting on what was positive now. The others were further along with this already, so I needed to catch up! This group session did a lot to take me there. It opened my eyes to what was positive NOW and to stop thinking about the negatives. I now have inklings to how I might take this further into post-pandemic times.

I must thank my fellow attendees for my own insights. I am learning how to group coach now and am finding first hand how orchestrating the composition of the group can affect its outcome in many ways. It really shows how the cohesiveness and the power of the group can yield some awesome results for each participant.

I look forward to putting some of these post-pandemic insights into practice!