2020 - The year I learnt about vulnerability, resilience & gratefulness

2020. Well, what can I say? You’ve been brutal. 

The celebrations at the end of last year were awesome. We celebrated a year since moving to Abergavenny from the big city. (Cardiff, big-little city), setting up in new offices, found the most perfect nursery setting for our toddlers, celebrated growing our business to a team of 5 fabulously talented humans (and one dog), rejoiced in tempting some pretty epic clients into the fold and frankly; feeling in control, positive and finally spending more time working on the business instead of in it. I’m not going to lie, Dave and I were pretty much over being sleep deprived and never being able to finish a conversation, so this was a pretty epic situation to be in. And we were gleeful! 

Grief in lockdown 

On January 5th (2020, the cursed year), my beloved grandmother passed. It wasn’t a shock, she was 92 but when has that ever made things easier? She was the kindest woman I’ve ever known and I don’t think it will ever get easier. That was pretty hard. I thought that was the punch in the guts that would break me. I wrote and delivered her eulogy. It was pretty hard but I’m glad I did it. 

But then, on February 19th (2020, the fast becoming worst year in history), my lovely Dad left us. This was a shock. I won’t and can’t go into details but he’d been poorly for a while, but not to the extent that I thought this would happen. The feeling was horrific. I’m not even going to try and explain it with some dreamy description or metaphor because I can’t, not now. Probably not ever.

His funeral, on the 17th of March, was the last time I saw my mother, my stepmother, my sisters, my friends, our extended family face to face. In the same room. Able to hug. Able to hold each other. Bloody coronavirus. 

There’s no pause button

Like always and like it is for everyone, life doesn’t just thoughtfully pause for you to have a meltdown and hideaway amongst the pillows, playing Bob Dylan far too loudly and drinking too much gin. It goes on, with or without you. Don’t get me wrong, my wonderful husband and our amazing team kept the kids and the clients fed for as long as they could (until lockdown hit the fan) while the shock subsided but I remember distinctly, on day two, replying to emails to clients, checking over project work and thinking ‘this isn’t right, shouldn’t I be allowed to visit and hug my family, sit around talking about him and spending time together?’ I remember feeling it was unfair. That life was cruel.  It made me angry and it felt like 2020 was, absolutely the worst start to a decade that there could ever be. Looking back, I think I would’ve drowned in grief if I hadn’t had family, work and just normal life to have to spring back to and be present at. Oh, and Zoom. 

Resilience 

It’s one of those words, isn’t it? You hear it all the time, especially if you watch tonnes of Ted Talks and read business blogs, articles and books all the time. To be honest, it’s something that just passed over my head without really taking it in. Mainly because I never thought I’d ever really suffered any real adversity (none worth mentioning, in this article anyway). I associated ‘resilience’, in the context of my business. ‘We were going to be resilient, persevere through the quiet periods, adapt, work hard...etc etc’. But I’d never, ever thought about it in the context of my personal life. I’ve been very lucky, I know this. 

2020, changed that. My dad's funeral was on Thursday, and on Monday we were told to shut up shop and everyone had to work from home. Projects we had lined up were cancelled (they called it ‘postponed’), projects in progress were cancelled halfway through, campaigns that were finished were launched but invoices weren’t being paid, we couldn’t get through to anyone to find out when they would be paid. Total panic stations. Now, as well as my overwhelming grief bubbling up inside, we (myself and Dave) were in a state of meltdown, wondering what was going to happen next, how were we going to pay the team, how were we going to pay our bills? 

Dave is an optimist to the point of annoyance (I’ve said this before, it’s utterly irritating but also why I married him) so he was instantly in ‘adapt’ mode and finding the silver linings. I’m the opposite, all I could focus on is what the future would look like if we lost all our clients, had to let the team go after only finding them, putting them in a position where they couldn’t live and eat and be, what we’d do if we didn’t keep up with the mortgage payments. Along with all the other shit that had happened so far, it really felt like a lost cause. But, there’s that word again, resilience. But before that, a key move. An important move. Asking for help. I’m not going to mention names, because someone inevitably gets annoyed (eye-roll emoji) but I learnt or re-learnt some important lessons from those wonderful souls and from the books and resources they pointed me to and even my super negative and ‘everything sucks’ default persona started to flicker. 

Shit Happens

Turns out, suffering is part of life. I know, who knew?! This is something that resilient people all know, apparently. There’s a fantastic Ted Talk by Lucy Hone, called the 3 secrets of resilient people and before you watch it, know that it will probably make you cry and then make you scribble things over post-its and stick them to your monitor. (That’s what I did anyway). But the thing is, if we understand this, then we can understand that we’re not being victimised, we’re not being punished or singled out. Shit happens to people every day, all over the world and we all have a choice in how we react. I knew that gazillions of people have lost parents, billions of people were worrying about their livelihoods, those same people were also not able to visit and be with their families or even visit them in a hospital or care home.

It’s a difficult one that isn’t it? Of course we, as humans (minus a few very questionable characters in this world right now) know that everyone is going through tough times and we feel a new connection now with each other because we have a shared experience. But in contrast, we’re all in household bound bubbles and ‘feeling’ that shared experience is harder than it seems. But it can be done.

In business, we’ve learnt that resilience is as important as ever. After pulling ourselves out of a ‘we won’t have a business to come back to’ mode, we decided that now is not the time to be going quiet, now is the time to be shouting from the rooftops about show the value we can bring and why other business needed to keep focussing on their marketing plans and the future ahead. We’ve managed to finally re-brand the business (after a year of talking about it) to reflect the growth and the team and we’ve launched some packages to help businesses stay on top of their marketing, and to help the businesses that already are staying on top; stand out from the noise. These were something we’d been thinking about launching for a while but had never really scheduled the time in to actually make happen. Cue, a crisis to make us sit up, take notice, listen to what our clients wanted and needed and actually design something in response. The whole situation really kicked us into action and made us focus on who we want to be as a business and who we want to be working with. 

We’ve had a fantastic response to the new brand and services and it really turned things around for us. Instead of worrying if we’re going to keep the business afloat, we’re now worrying whether we have the manpower to sustain it and keep projects heading out of the door. Which is a fantastic place to find ourselves in, considering? 

Learning where to direct our attention and time

It’s been one hell of a learning curve learning when to say no. A people pleaser at heart, I’d be saying yes to everything even though secretly I was dreading that Sunday bbq over at someone’s house I barely knew. Worrying about offending people and seeming ‘off’ was definitely something that was constantly on my brain. These days, it comes a lot easier but during these strange times, there seems to be a different type of obstacle. Namely, how many Zoom gatherings can I really cope with this week? Seriously, I didn’t see these people that much before! 

Even though we’re constantly being bombarded with messages like ‘what will you do with this time?’ or ‘what new skills will you learn in lockdown?’ (Jeez, social media, stop making me feel shit for wanting to sit on my sofa for five minutes). Do we really have more time? It doesn’t feel like it. Between working full time, parenting full time, walking the dog, trying to keep the house from smelling like an armpit, cooking, video calling constantly and trying to get a good night’s sleep it actually feels like a lot less time. So where we spend our time and what we focus on really matters.

It’s helpful to think about whether the action or activity you're doing at that time is helpful or is it a hindrance? Is thinking about and feeling guilty about shoving ipads in your kid's laps while you try and get through a conference call helpful? Or is knowing that you’re doing the best you can and that it is, at this moment, completely necessary more helpful? 

Carefully choose where you’re directing your attention and your thoughts. You can choose to direct your attention to the positive things, the things that make you feel better, the things that will get you through the day. Learning to enjoy the little things, the positive points in an otherwise chaotic and stressful environment and time will see you through. I’m still working on this, it’s not my natural state. 

In business, we’ve stopped thinking ‘will our business fail?’, ‘will continuing to promote our business and services come across as tactless or unsympathetic?’ and focus on the things we know. Yes, it is important and vital that we continue to shout about what we do and how we can help businesses come through this. Yes, it’s necessary today to give the kids a little more screen time than usual, so we can make that sale, bring in some business so that we can make sure we’re still able to work and provide employment when this is all over. 

Learning to adapt

Speaking of which, learning to adapt and go with the flow has been ever important. We’re having to adapt to being stay at home parents while simultaneously running a business. We’re having to adapt to not seeing family or relying on childcare or even having much needed alone time to recharge and recuperate. But we do adapt. We all can. And it’s much easier if you can focus on those positives and choose where you direct your energy, as mentioned above. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t always follow my own advice but one thing I have found useful during all this is to write down three things every day that were good about the day, or things that I’m grateful for. I like to jot them down on colourful post-its and stick them around my computer screen. Give it a try. 

Adapting to a new way of working was tough but there was no other choice, as it was with most of the world. Our bustling creative studio sits empty while our talented team have squirrelled themselves away in their creative dens, continuing to give their best and stay positive. For which I will forever be grateful. Our team meetings with coffee and doughnuts, replaced with zoom catch-ups and general studio chit-chat replaced by WhatsApp gifs and email threads. We are extremely fortunate to be in an industry that doesn’t really need us to be in the same room, that doesn't rely on customers coming in and out so really, we can’t moan. Those poor souls in the hospitality industry especially have had it really rough. 

Meanwhile, everything we do can simply be whisked off via the cloud and uploaded and downloaded wherever it needs to be. We’re still trying to resemble a team, even if we are all separated. We focused our marketing on digital campaigns instead, for now, which meant we had to change and adapt our messaging and services, but it’s been a real learning curve and even, dare I say it, beneficial to be forced to examine the business as a whole. As I touched on earlier, I don’t think our new packages would’ve seen the light of day for another few months, not unless we had been plunged into survival mode. 

Remembering to create time to look after yourself

Time! Wherefore art thou? We’re learning to find some re-charging time where we can. In normal times it would be dinner somewhere and a lovely lie in (I miss babysitters) but these days it comes in much smaller bitesize chunks. A twenty-minute read here (while the kids are playing together, miraculously quietly), a solitary evening walk there. We’re even finding new joy in doing simple things like baking bread with the kids or attempting to know what we’re doing in the garden. Planting seeds and getting muddy. 

But in between the joy there is also the challenge of being present at work, being available to businesses who are also working on strange and unpredictable timetables and trying to make the best of it. Sometimes it feels a little tough to give enough time to everyone. All we can do is our best. Thankfully, everyone has been so flexible and understanding. Probably because they're in the same boat.

All in all, things are looking positive and we’re even looking forward to welcoming some new team members over the next couple of months. I’ve enjoyed quality time with the kids at home and honestly saved a bunch of cash on those nursery fees! (silver lining!) 

But there is something big, in my heart that’s on pause until I can find some real quiet time to digest and release it. Grief. It leaves me wondering if this is a normal occurrence for others too? And if it is, when will we find the time? Life doesn't just pause.