Now, I’m not saying I’m a control freak. After all, the process of labelling people is reductive, limiting fascinating, complex people with stereotypes. That said, if I were, even on the odd occasion, to show any tendencies that might be associated with a stereotypical control freak, then I might be in a good position to sympathise with anyone who’s confounded by a COVID-19 world where daily choices we used to take for granted are no longer ours to make.
Reverse psychology is a killer. Have you ever walked into a museum or National Trust property with no desire whatsoever to touch a prehistoric dinosaur skeleton or bounce up and down on a 500-year-old Tudor bed, until you clock the sign ‘Do not touch’? No? Good, nor me J.
The irony of this temptation recently struck me anew in my lockdown routine. Back when I was hanging out on the sofa out of choice, Bridget Jones-style with a tub of ice-cream, a good book and music on at an antisocial volume, you couldn’t have dragged me out of the house. Now, oh now, I so much as see the neighbour go to put his rubbish out once a week and I dive outside to get a buzz from the in-real-life human interaction of a knowing nod, or, on an action-packed day, even a wave from a socially safe distance.
My desire to prove that my choices are still my own fulfilled, I can head back inside and crack on with that ice-cream. But, wait. The ice-cream presents yet another opportunity to establish control in my newly regulated world. To eat, or not to eat. To work out, or… to give up entirely, wilfully blaming COVID-19 for my new 24/7 yoga pant-wearing habit (with a neatly ironed shirt on top, of course, to preserve public appearances for video calls).
I may be exaggerating (though not much), but I’d be interested to know how many people are nodding along as they read, or indulging in another of my new solo-lifestyle habits – commentating my personal take on the good and the bad of articles or LinkedIn posts out loud as if me and myself are hanging on every word I have to say.
My point? (There’s always one buried in there somewhere). We can’t control the uncontrollable as much as we (I) might like to, and there’s no cure yet for everything that’s happening around us, or our need to make sense of it in our own ways. What we can do, is interrupt our thought loops (which have a lot of time to fester at the moment) and let ourselves off the hook. So we can’t solve the problem. So what?
Moving away a second from our personal lives (although being in a home office with few demands on my social life mean that work and life have a tendency to blend at the moment), have you ever found the perfect solution to a problem at work? I’m not sure I have, but I have a few tricks for getting close to it. I’m tempted at this point to put a handy list of healthy eating, exercising and mindfulness tips, all of which would be truly useful. However, there are far greater experts on those topics and far from being an expert, I haven’t even nailed them for myself, so instead I’ll simply share the life hacks that work for me.
Firstly, I’m a firm believer in marginal gains. Having said I wasn’t going to give advice on mindfulness, I am in one way practising a core component by necessity at the moment. I’m focused on the here and now, accepting the situation in which I find myself, taking each day as it comes, being grateful for what I’ve achieved in that day and setting myself achievable targets for the next. Having just started a new job and being locked down without an end date to plan to, that process and in particular the shift from control to acceptance is treating me well.
Secondly, I’m an even firmer believer in teamwork. We talk about effective collaboration in the workplace or in professional partnerships between individuals or organisations a lot. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent most of my career working in sport, maybe it’s because of how my brain is structured, but I look on my friends and family outside of work as my home team. I wouldn’t be able to achieve what I do in my professional life if I didn’t know I had rock solid support, advice and endless levity when I step away (even in the most challenging of times).
Anyone reading this who knows me, knows there are few things I like more than making new friends – maybe in part because I’ve had such a brilliant experience with the old ones. It may seem counterintuitive since in many ways we’re artificially being held apart from one another, but now is the perfect time to rekindle connections and even find new ones. Despite what Instagram might be telling you, everyone else does not have a perfect life, while yours is a rollercoaster. Right now, many of the perfect vistas posted are throwbacks anyway! We all have ups and downs and we all need support. When we get that support, it suddenly becomes easier to loosen our control (back on topic).
There’s no rule to making friends either. An uncanny number of my closest friends will agree that we bonded on the day we met, although we grew to know one another better over time. One of my heroes is George Harrison and I can’t put it better than in his immortal words: “We’re drawn to each other. That’s how I feel about friends. Even if I have only known them for a day, it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to wait until I’ve known them two years.” These relationships both at work and in life allow the burden to be shared, in my case again relaxing that need for control. Plus, I would never admit this to them, but I find that my close friends and family do on an uncanny number of occasions know better than me.
None of this means that now or in future we won’t feel anxious. Only yesterday I discovered that you can even get ‘mindfulness anxiety’ from over-meditating (here I was thinking that worst case I had mindfulness exercises in my back-pocket as the ultimate stress cure). I also had a conversation about Easter Island which in one five minute period led me first to remember I couldn’t go there if I wanted to (and I’d love to) and then to reflect on the eerie quality of what it would be like to be in the place furthest from anywhere else on Earth.
To conclude my Week 8 musings, I wonder if there are positive lessons we can take from this experience that will translate to a future life free of COVID-19. Even the daily churn which has now been disrupted is a way of controlling the unknown through routine. I’ve spoken before about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. If we can do that, we might see our best creative work, our most innovative ideas and purpose-filled partnerships come to bear on the other side of this seemingly unpassable ravine.
It’s handy that the image of a ravine came up (and not in the slightest contrived), because I wanted to end on a Buddhist story that has stuck with me. Two monks are crossing a river when they come across a young woman who is stranded on one side, needing to reach the other. They’ve both taken vows never to touch a woman yet one of the monks picks her up, carries her to the other side then re-joins his companion to continue his journey. He moves on and doesn’t consider the episode again. However, for a long time the monk who kept his vows berates his friend, incredulous at how he could have acted against his commitments with such little thought. The transgressor finally turns to him and says: “I put her down long ago, you are still carrying her.”
In these unprecedented times (always keen to drop in the word of the moment), we can’t control the world around us, strictly adhere to the parameters we may have built around our lives until now (and perhaps should consider loosening up anyway – in my case that’s certainly true) or find the perfect solution. What we can do is be kind to one another, respond to the circumstances we find ourselves in and just occasionally, cut ourselves some slack. On which note, I’m off to have some chocolate.
Katie Traxton is an ESA Board Director and Chief Communications Officer at Formula E. She was previously Managing Partner at WeAreFearless, ESA’s Pan-Europe Sponsorship Agency of the Year.