How to bring out your best during Professionally Challenging times?

How do we see challenges in life? How do we conduct ourselves during Challenging times?

What do we learn out of failures and our bad experiences, setbacks? Learning out of every experience is very important and critical to take control of our lives and shape our destiny. 

Challenging times tend to bring out the best in any professional. It only depends on how one keeps himself confident and composed to face it and bring out his best. It is not wrong to say that Challenging times tend to teach us our life's most important lessons.

If we don't learn from our experiences and learn how to come out stronger as a better person, then it calls for self-introspection as to where are we going wrong.

Everything is a mind game. Our thoughts control our emotions. How do we regulate our thoughts? How do we learn to be happy? How do we make being happy a habit? 

I have seen many professionals facing hard and tough times due to the Corona pandemic. They have lost a job and their earnings have stopped whereas their responsibilities /expenses remain the same. 

I have gone through a couple of rough patches in my life and learned the following :

Use this break to do something that you have not been able to pursue due to professional commitments. Do something you love to do. Something constructive, something that gives you a feeling of accomplishment. 

Acquire some skills, knowledge that helps you become a better professional. 

I used one of these breaks to teach Mathematics to my elder son. Once I did it for 30 days, I got a sense of great accomplishment. With this sense of accomplishment, I was much more positive and happy as a person and it even helped me become more effective in my job search and subsequent interviews. Thereafter it became my habit to teach my son Mathematics for 2 hours every week and am doing it for the last 4 years regularly irrespective of whatever work pressures and other commitments I have to honor daily. I also saw a drastic improvement and he started scoring more than 95 % marks in mathematics. Besides, I also refreshed the fundamentals and today I can teach maths to any student till class 12th. 

Enhance your professional skills. Do some professional courses from reputed institutions. Once you decide to go for it during one of the breaks, you will for sure pursue it till completion. I have decided to do some professional courses for working executives being conducted by IIM's soon. 

Work on your weaknesses. I did one month course in finance during one of my professional breaks. This helped me in my next career move. 

Spend some quality time with family. Complete pending tasks that you have not been able to do for long and are overdue. This would make you feel more relaxed. 

Be socially active in a professional circle and explore good and challenging assignments for yourself by connecting with the right people. 

Read a lot. Self-help/motivational books, latest technology trends, whatever interests you and can help you become a better professional and a better person 

Spend time and work on improving your health. Exercise, do yoga, meditation, walks. Though am sure many of us above 40 would be following this. Social distancing norms is important while doing all this during corona times. 

The key is to Spend time on constructive pursuits during professional breaks, rather than getting depressed. There is a lot to do other than your job which can be done and trust me, If you Spend time constructively, you would come out as a winner, and as we all know tough times don't last forever, but tough people do. 

Am sure you would get a much better assignment than what you were handling earlier. 

Always remember the key is to remain positive and happy during these tough times. Negative thinking during challenging times is a strict no. It's one-way traffic, once you go in that direction it's a long and painful journey before you can come back to the starting point. It's like a mire. Be positive, be hopeful, add value each day by focusing on self-development. 

Do the SWOT analysis of yourself as a professional and as an individual. Work on those during your professional break. If you are not so good at communication, work on your communication skills, learn about the latest technological trends in the market. Follow companies that are market leaders.

God has factored the same amount of happiness for all, It is up to us as an individual to see that our happiness quotient is 100 % ( efficiency to convert our quota of assigned happiness to reality). That can happen only by our actions and attitude. 

So just be happy, work on your weaknesses, keep your mind engaged in constructive thoughts and come out stronger. An idle mind is a devil's paradise. Being without a job does not mean we cannot add value for self during these days. As mentioned above keep yourself engaged in constructive pursuits ( few have mentioned above). 

Always remember every negative thought is multiple steps in the wrong direction. So for sure don't fall into the trap of negative thinking during challenging times Master your mind and it will be your friend always. 

Focus on mental wellbeing. All your actions, thoughts should be in that direction.