A rather alarmed, fairly new client contacted VIM Executive Coaching the other day. He was in a panic.
“This new normal just getting to me. I need a consultation! Between a few ‘human’ issues, pandemic problems and all the Zoom meetings, I’m going crazy!”
After he was gently advised to take a deep breath, he was reminded of a lesson we all too quickly forget.
The “New Normal” is Now
A great many years ago, an aunt who was by then well past middle-age, happened to remember the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. The context was simply one of nostalgic remembrances. She talked of great fear and of people wearing face masks and washing things down with harsh cleansers in boiling pots of water and using gritty hand soap. She talked of wounded men coming back from war and trying to pick up the pieces of interrupted lives.
“It was hard times, but we made it through.”
Another relative chimed in and remembered being a teenager when the radio crackled and announced that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. He precisely remembered reading the “funny papers” when the lightheartedness of a Sunday breakfast was shattered.
“It was at the end of The Great Depression,” he said. “I was working as a delivery boy for a grocer to help bring money into the household. I remember men leaving businesses to their wives or older relatives who were 4-F. Those women ran those businesses and they thrived just fine. My mother’s sisters went to work for Curtiss-Wright to build fighter planes.”
The conversation continued around the family gathering, generation to generation, and without realizing it, they encapsulated a history of hardship and triumph.
In talking to our client, we wanted him to understand that there is no “new normal,” there is only now. Now is what we have, and now is what every executive leader must build upon.
At what age, in what time, has there been no challenge, no hardship or no need to readjust thinking? The answer is obvious: every era, every age has had its challenges and triumphs. There are fears, there are uncertainties, but one thing is clear: authenticity survives.
Making it Through
We continued talking with our client:
“If anyone of us is waiting for happier times, easier times or stress-free times, they will never find them.”
The executive leader must realize that corporations or associations go through cycles, including having “human issues.” If we had never had a challenge, if nothing had ever changed, we would be stuck in the past.
If the aunt who was talking of the Spanish Flu magically came back to life, she would have no clue as to what a video-conference might entail, let alone a personal computer or the internet. But she would easily understand an executive respecting and listening to an employee, or weighing options and responding to a challenge or making a decision based on reflecting and being mindful, rather than doing something in a spur-of-the-moment manner.
Organizations make it through hard times by being mindful, and the best executives are the most authentic. In turn, employees will best respond to executive leaders who are authentic and employees will learn to be mindful in their actions.
The Spanish Flu, by all accounts was awful. Far worse than COVID-19. Throughout time, organizations gearing up, and changing production for new markets, or shifting distribution patterns, or inventory challenges, or facing new technologies and needing new ways to communicate are not new.
Executives, mindful of the challenges, either adapt or lose ground.
Around that dinner table, while there was plenty of nostalgia, no one said “the old days were all fun and games.” They weren’t. The youngest in outlook conceded that “we live in the times in which we live,” and by being good people, real (authentic) people and by compassion we will succeed.
“Tomorrow” will neither be better nor worse than today, but if we simply understand that tomorrow will come, we can empower ourselves to have the tools to be ready for come what may.