Lockdown or Quarantine, how to stay sane and recharge your batteries over the weekend.

Thank god it's Friday!

 Really? For many of us right now this means staying in lockdown or in quarantine and not being able to leave the premises of your own home.

Due to a COVID19 case in my family, I will spend the next 14 days in quarantine. So how much can you really say: thank god it's Friday? Or better said how can I use my weekend to relax, and recharge my batteries without getting all wrapped up in the news that right now stretch from horrible developments around this pandemic to a new wave of terrorism in France and the upcoming election in the United States.

While many studies show how much fear, anxiety and depression the pandemic has caused so far, I think especially for you as a CEO and a leader you need, and hopefully, you also want to take responsibility.

Responsibility not only for the well-being of your company and its financial success. No, it is equally important to see how to strengthen your own resilience and obviously also the resilience of all the people working for you.

The well-known psychologist Barbara Frederickson describes in her “broaden and build” theory, the importance of experiencing positive emotions on a regular basis. Positive emotions such as joy, pride, and gratitude strengthen your resilience and allow you to have a more positive outlook on the world. According to Frederickson people who experience positive emotions on a regular basis also strengthen the following resources:

On a physical level, it boosts your immune system, on a social level it is easier to build strong relationships and experience more empathy, on an emotional level, you are way more resilient towards stress and anxiety. This helps you to be more productive and more adaptable to change.

Somehow these all seem to be pretty important qualities during a global pandemic.

 Now how can you get to your healthy dose of good impressions and positive emotions when the whole world out there seams unpredictable, volatile, complex, and uncertain?

 Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff, describe in their book “savoring, a new model of positive experience” how we can attend to the joys, pleasures and positive emotions.

They describe four distinctions on how we experience those wonderful emotions. These distinctions follow two different dimensions.

The first dimension at stake has to do with the locus of our attribution of the experience. Do we experience the cause of the emotion as being external or internal?

The second one is dependent on whether our experience is mainly cognitive or mainly emotional.

In a combination of these two dimensions we can find the following four quadrants:

Now while many of you would agree with me, that pride and gratitude is something we can achieve and experience during the workweek, when accomplishing a difficult task, by completing a project, or by acquiring a new client. We might feel grateful towards the team we are working with, or you feel grateful towards your boss for being a good role model or acknowledging your effort and achievements.

But we rarely experience sensual pleasure or the emotions of awe and wonder during a workweek.

Nevertheless, those feelings are very important for our emotional wellbeing, for our adaptability, creativity and for our sense of purpose.

We can feel awe and wonder when we are standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, or when we stand in front of the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. You are right, travelling is not an option right now. But we can also feel awe and wonder when we see someone acting out of pure compassion, showing strength to do what is right and not that which is easy. A wonderful example for that right now is the protests which are going on in Belarus. I admire the fearlessness of the people in the streets, who despite the fear of being beaten or ending up in jail, go out on the streets and make their voices heard.

Awe and wonder happen outside and touches us deep within, it helps us to see that we are part of something larger than ourselves, it kicks us out of our current reality, that might feel like a big never-ending headache and lifts us up to access more of our innate potential.

A wonderful way to experience awe and wonder is when looking at amazing artwork such as Picasso's painting Guernica, Dali's’ painting “Gala and the tigers” or Van Gogh's picture of the little café in Arles. Taking the time to take it in, and to enjoy the beauty allows us to feel a sense of awe and wonder. What it also might trigger in you is a deep longing for mastery.

Those painters have definitely achieved mastery in their craft.

Every one of us has a deep longing of achieving competence, or even mastery in what we are doing, and in how we are interacting with this world. Looking at these masterpieces can remind us, that there is even more in us, that we have to give. Maybe not by doing more, or by being even more busy. No, maybe we can give more, when we take more time, to inhale that which fills us with awe and wonder in this world. And to take time to exhale, that which touches us, that which fills us with joy and wonder.

As a leader it is our job to see the potential, the strengths, the opportunities out there and to be in a deep relationship with our stakeholders, with our clients and the people we lead.

And most of all we need to be in a deep relationship with ourselves.

 So how can we strengthen this relationship on a weekend that we spend in quarantine and can’t go anywhere?

Here is my suggestion for you:

The following website shows you the 10 best virtual museums.

https://www.elitetraveler.com/design-culture/10-best-virtual-museum-tours

1.  Pick one or two, to visit over the weekend: Whether you take a tour at the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the Vatican Museum in Rome, it doesn't matter.
2. Find the pictures that fill you with awe and wonder.
3. Inhale, exhale: Take time to connect, to be touched and maybe to be changed.

 “The purpose of art is washing the dust of our daily life off our souls.” Pablo Picasso

Thanks for the Photos by Calvin Craig, Chad Greiter, and Edgar Castrej on Unsplash