Resilience in times of lockdown – a messy conversation with myself.

It seems every conversation I have these days, with colleagues, friends and clients starts with the same few sentences: “yah, doing OK, it’s crazy. But do we have a choice?”

I believe that we do have a choice – a choice about how we relate to what’s going on, what we decide to make of the situation that we are all in. Are we a helpless victim or are we a creative actor in this situation? I believe that resilience, the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, is what determines my choice every time I am in the “craziness” of the moment. 

I work as a coach, consultant, faculty member of a coaching school – and we have 3 children 7, 11, 14, two of them dyslexic, who we currently have to homeschool, whilst both working from home. It’s crazy, and often overwhelming and yet I also acknowledge that we are privileged: we have enough space, IT equipment and materials for all of us to work with and we have found an amazing therapist who helps us develop in the midst of all of this anxiety and overwhelm.

As a coach and consultant for teams, I am naturally curious about what we can learn about ourselves from within a changing environment, the more extreme, the better. So, my first approach to lockdown and homeschooling was: to be curious. 

• Be curious about how the kids would react to being schooled 1-1 by mum or dad (nightmare, both sides concluded that we should rather have a parent-child than a teacher-student relationship), 
• Be curious how my husband would feel about working from home (aha, he doesn’t miss all the travel, but he discovers it’s quite intense when you have no transition times between meetings AND a house and family to run), 
• Be curious about juggling the needs and wants of everyone else while doing deep work with my clients (OK, I could have known before that I am not thriving when I do not have enough time to myself).

As you can imagine, not everything went as smoothly as my consultant mind had planned it, I got curious about what others have to say. There is so much advice out there that works if we apply them – get organised, get energised, prioritise, be compassionate with others.

We implemented some of these pieces of advice, we planned meals, we scheduled work together and alone, we planned how we split chores, we agreed on screen time with the kids and a bonus system for work done. We planned family time and recently we started travelling on Sundays to foreign countries (i.e. we cook traditional dishes, watch a documentary and a movie, listen to music, … from that country).

Sounds idyllic? Yes, it does and being a coach, I often think that I should have my act together. That I should be able to be compassionate and not be impatient with my family. The truth is: I don’t have it all together. At least not all the time. I get impatient, I scold my kids, I snap at my husband and we all spend a bit of time being mad at each other and miserable.

This is where resilience comes in. For me, resilience is the ability to be able to see myself caught up in the story of being a victim of the situation. What I mean by that is that I just see the new circumstances as constraints that I have no control over. It can take time, but with resilience, I am able to stop, take a deep breath and see the situation simply for what it is – rather than a drama in the life of Miriam. And that I do have control - control over my attitude in meeting these new circumstances. This is when I manage to stop shouting “silence!” and start laughing as the kids try out their new roller skates in the living room (because there’s snow outside).

How then do I learn to take that step back in the heat of a situation? I think it is another aspect of resilience - be compassionate with myself, and by this I don’t mean doing my nails or taking a hot bath. Most of the time, it’s recognising that yes, it’s a lot right now, yes, it’s hard, and I am no superwoman with a wand who just surfs through this smiling and looking good.

My resilience training program sometimes consists of not finishing that piece of work in the evening and just sitting down to  listen to a song that makes me laugh or cry. It’s having a chat with a friend who can hear that I’m finding it hard right now and sharing a hysterical laugh with my husband about an indoor-roller-skating child.

Looking back on almost a year of on and off again lockdown, home working and homeschooling: we have all grown. It doesn’t feel like that on some days and on other days we can clearly see it. We have become more resilient and creative in the way we live together and the way we approach our work or school. And most of all, we have become more able to recognise when it’s hard and when we need support.