Why It Could Be Time To Hit The Pause key

By Paolo Gallo who looks at how we live our lives and spend our time now and going forwards.

Mike Tyson once said: “Everyone has a strategy until they get a punch in their face”.

Well, Covid-19 is that punch.  In fact, I believe we got at least three punches. We got the first one as citizens – every country has been severely affected by it; the second punch as professionals – every business and every sector is in a very difficult spot; and the third punch as human beings as our life had been disrupted at so many levels, including for the people we deeply love.

Listening to the news, hearing what is happening, witnessing the dramatic stories of doctors and nurses working around the clock to save our life has been a sobering experience.  How can we possibly manage this unprecedented crisis?  In ancient Greek crisis means “a difficult and dangerous time in which a solution is needed”. So how can we now start preparing the ground for the solution of this crisis?  In my view, we need to start by pressing the “Pause” key.

Think about an amazing car, for example the Ferrari 812 Superfast: what does it allowr to go so fast? When I asked this question in my seminars, most of the people usually reply “the engine” or “the driver” or “the aerodynamics”. What actually allows a Ferrari or any car to go fast are… the brakes. Without brakes we couldn’t drive even five miles per hour because we will have an accident at the first traffic light. The same is valid for us: what allows us to go fast is our capacity to slow down, to use our internal brakes.

In other terms we need to stop by checking if we have enough gas in our tank.: in fact we have four different kinds of energy.  1) Physical energy, our general health and vitality – 2) Mental energy, our clarity and focus 3) Emotional: our resilience and emotional self-control and 4) Spiritual, our inner motivations and values that drives our decisions. Given the moment we are living we need to “use the brakes” by asking ourselves a very simple question: which source of energy has been the most depleted recently? My guess is that our emotional and spiritual reserves have been drained and – like a car – we are currently driving by using our reserves.

Therefore, what will help us refill the tank? We know for example that a walk in close contact with nature, a deep conversation with the people we love, physical exercise, meditation, listening to music, regular sleep are positive sources of energy while alcohol, over-eating, smoking or too much screen time have a negative effect on our energy.

Medical science can measure our physical fatigue and workload. Without it Roger Federer would not be the best tennis player at age 38. The point is that we are now in the knowledge economy and we need to measure the “cognitive workload” we are dealing with.

Our cognitive workload can be measured by three factors, according to Hinsta Performance,: the speed in which we are obliged to respond, the switching and interruptions we are subject to in our activity and the complexity of what we are dealing with.  If you look at your job, do you think that your cognitive workload has increased?

So, we had a strategy and then we got a punch in our face. As we are dealing with a disruptive crisis we need to use the brakes before re-starting with a new normal for a while. We need to check our level of energy and refill it with meaningful activities. In order to do so we need to pause and reflect to be ready when we restart.

The person we were before Covid 19 will be better at the end of this journey. As I am writing this article I feel that we are filled with hope that things will end up well, eventually. This experience is giving us a deep awareness, many learnings and a meaning we have missed so far as we were going too fast to notice.

Pause. Breath. Smile.

By Paolo Gallo,  Keynote speaker, Author, Executive coach

www.paologallo.net

https://www.linkedin.com/in/paolo-gallo-b996874/

twitter @pgallobussola1

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