Mukarram Mawjood’s Thoughts on Dealing with Crisis and COVID-19
In the wake of the COVID-19 I have been thinking a lot on how we deal with unexpected stress and disturbances in our lives. And I realized, life is all about the unexpected. We make these great plans and create lists of things to do and goals and then life doesn't corporate. Now some people I see, they use that as an excuse. “Oh well everything was going so well, but then I had this or that set back or fight with someone and that is why I can not succeed.” And while setbacks are indeed setbacks, they are not a reason to stop everything you are doing. If we function that way we will never get anywhere in life, we will simply just be recovering from each setback and will never be able to move forward in our goals in life. Of course this is not a way to live, yet I see people falling into this trap again and again. It is easy to create the excuse but what we really need to focus on is creating the mental toolkit on how to deal with setbacks and continue to move forward with our goals.
I have found a way for myself to deal with my personal setbacks and that is via routine. I have set up morning and evening rituals for myself, as well as created a routine of meditation and exercise routines that have helped me tremendously in setting my battle plan for the day and on how to handle crisis. I find solace in these personal and solo routines and truly believe that there is something in these routines for everyone. However, before we start getting into creating routines we need to see what exactly you need help with in your life, which we will do with the below exercise. Because of coronavirus, I have geared this article towards dealing with quarantine, but these steps can be used in any situation where you need to create a plan to tackle a crisis.
Although coronavirus and the subsequent lockdowns and shuttering of the economy is something we have never experienced before, it does not mean we need to approach it blindly. If you look back in your life and how you have dealt with sudden loss of employment, relationship issues or other traumatic events you will see that ultimately COVID-19 is no different than any other issue we have faced. Now the question is how did you deal with these issues in the past? Together we are going to take a short journey of self discovery and create a plan on how you will recover from COVID-19. All you will need is your favorite mechanism to write your thoughts out, be it a paper journal, laptop or tablet and 15-20 minutes of quiet time.
1 - Write out your Recovery Journeys
Now that you are ready to go on this journey, take a moment to analyze a particularly painful setback you went through and write down what steps you took to recover from it and how successful you felt you were. This can be as simple as a 5 minute journaling session, to several hours of contemplation. Once you have finished writing out the skeleton of this experience, try to find several more setbacks in your life and also write how you recovered and your personal feelings on how well you did. It would be particularly useful to have examples from several facets of your life, for example take a nasty breakup, a loss of employment, and a sudden accident, but this is not necessary. You should now have at least 3 experiences written down along with your recovery and rating of success. Do you notice any patterns in your life? Are there some things that worked for you every time? Note your patterns, positive and negative, as well as the solutions that always seem to work for you, off to the side so you can reference them later.
2 - Analyze your Bad Habits
Here comes the difficult part. Now that you have taken time to assess your solution finding abilities, how do you feel about them? Are you happy with how you have dealt with problems in the past? If not, what things would you change? It is hard to turn the critical eye onto ourselves, but it is necessary in order to grow as a stronger person. Once you have established the things you wish to change in your reactions to setbacks, start brainstorming ways you could handle these setbacks better. For example, if one of the things you don't like about yourself is that you have overly emotional reactions to setbacks, take a moment to figure out what causes you to react emotionally. Is it because you start overworking yourself, not sleeping, not eating or exercising properly? The reason may not be readily apparent so keep the question pinned to your task list or figuratively in your head and let your subconscious work on it. The reason should present itself within a few days as your subconscious works on it and as you go back and think on it periodically. Don't be afraid to ask loved ones their opinions on how you handle crises. Though they will not see all your inner workings they may notice a habit of yours in times of stress that you may not see at first. The reason also might be very readily apparent, if so write it down and keep going to the next step!
3 - Take Proactive Steps
Once you have identified the reason why you have the bad reaction you can start working to control that from happening. Using the example again, say the reason why you overreact emotionally is because you stop eating your normal meals and start starving yourself and then overcompensating by overeating junk food. Now that you know this is one of your weaknesses, perhaps you should look into investing time and energy into food prepping or hiring a service to do it for you. Go through each of your negative reactions and try to identify the source and a solution for each one. Of course this is not a perfect practice and you can be kind with yourself, but diligence is the only way to get yourself equipped to protect yourself from your bad habits. Now armed with this information and proactively creating a routine and solution for it, you are better prepared for your next set back!
Another proactive step you need to consider is removing negative influences from your life. Be mindful of how you feel after interactions with people, movies, music, food, entertainment and so on. If any of these interactions makes you feel drained or bad on yourself, consider removing these obstacles from your life. Though you may not realize it, even these small daily occurrences can increase cortisol levels which can cause increased stress responses and also create a pattern of negative thinking in yourself. Anytime you find yourself going down this path of negative thinking, take a moment to consider what brought you there. If you notice patterns, consider removing those influences from your life.
Of course one month into lockdown is not a very opportune time to start a major overhaul in your life, but these steps can be used for you to properly and logically assess your track record of recovery and how best you can deal with the virus crisis. Once you have the blueprint of how you deal with setbacks and a plan on how to proactively approach your negative habits, you can tackle the crisis of COVID-19 for yourself personally. Even though this could be a very hard time emotionally and financially for you, making it hard to reset your life, the complete standstill of the world is also the perfect time to make a hard reset on your life and habits. I encourage you to use this time as a period of self discovery and mastery. As Tony Robbins says, progress equals happiness and if you can accomplish that, that's a big deal!
How are you creating a recovery plan for COVID-19? What steps have you already taken to protect your future? Reach out to us at info@bullionite.com with your questions and comments.