Am I fine? Yah, but this is different.

We talk a lot about work from home and mental health. In a meeting Friday morning the topic came up and made me start to think.  We ask each other how we are doing all the time and the natural semi-robotic answer is that we are fine or surviving right?

Am I fine? Yah, I’m fine, but there are different levels of fine and I am dealing with some new and major differences right now.

My day: Wake up, go run, news, Joe Biden is losing his mind and Donald Trump is ruining the country. Police brutality and another city is fire and oh yah, don’t forget Covid 19 has taken over the world. Shower, get dressed, pick a shirt, pick some pants, then the reality hits that pants don’t matter anymore.

Now I’m ready to get to work. I make my way to the same dark corner basement room that I have now sat in for the last 130 days. Then it hits, the moment of anxiety when you start to wonder “How good is my internet going to work today? Am I going to drop off calls or turn into a robot?” So embarrassing/frustrating. 

The zoom meetings begin and at some point, due to weak internet signal, I am forced to take all the risks of going upstairs. I enter the “free zone” which consists of 3 crazy children and a wife in the kitchen. Too many days of this have gone by and all respect or fear for zoom meetings is gone as they and I have simply become white noise in the background to my family. 

Good news, I saved it and didn’t get dropped from the meeting. Next thing I know my three-year-old is hanging around the back of my neck and I do my best to keep composure while trying to breath and not freak out on her. While this is all going on the other two are arguing loudly nearby (which can be heard) which is also when the wife decides to lay the smack down and release her own string of verbal warnings… 

These are my new anxiety’s. I never used to care how my internet was doing unless Netflix was choking out. Now it’s a daily stressor. I never had to worry about my family life being broadcast to my coworkers, boss or clients.

A couple other major changes that I was probably not mentally prepared for was being with my family ALL of the time and I am oddly missing my drive/alone time. (This is a big one for me)

For me, it is these little things that I overlooked that are the actual cause of my main new stresses. Am I ok? Yah, it’s life. Are most of these issues correctable? Yes, if we take the time to identify them and create a solution that works. Will I be upgrading my internet? YES! Don’t ignore or overlook these changes that have created new or different stresses that tend to ball up and start weighing you down.

As leaders we tend to naturally do our best to blaze forward with strength and optimism for our team, which is good, but there might be a flip side that I know I didn’t consider. Are we creating an environment where are employees feel like they need to follow the leader and do the same?

One of our leaders opened up to his team about his challenges with working from home and was surprised to see how they opened up about how they were really doing. It is OK to be human. It is OK to open up to your teams and be a little bit vulnerable and it might surprise you how they respond.

Do some proactive planning ahead so that you don’t have to react. School is starting soon. Have you considered any new adjustments that might need to be made? Winter is coming. This is a time of year that naturally can take a toll on people mentally. What steps can we take right now to prepare for any upcoming challenges?  

In the end it is OK to not be OK, but it is also OK to be OK. The reality is most of us are probably somewhere in between and could be doing better. I believe in many cases it is smaller unidentified changes that have caused much of this stress. Again, I believe that much of these can be resolved by being identified and each of us creating the right effective solutions for ourselves. Now the call to action is to take some time and identify what is creating your stress/anxiety and create real solutions that will help reduce or resolve. 

Chins up and don’t forget to embrace the pro’s that have also come as part of all of this.