180: Pivot-in-Progress—12 Reflection Questions

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello friends. Happy Sunday. Or at least as happy as it can be given everything that's going on. I know so many of you are dealing with a lot right now and we're all trying to find gratitude and light amidst all the madness. I'm recording this on Friday, April 3rd and I just wanted to come to you today with some reflection questions that have been helpful for me as and with others that I have shared them with as we reflect on this pandemic in progress and Pivot in progress before we jump into this conversation. Two live events coming up this week and if you listen to my screen fatigue episode, I hear you. I know there's already so much going on, but just in case one of these two things feels like just what you need on Wednesday, Penny Pierce is joining us for Pivot Insider. That's at 3:30pm Eastern on Wednesday, April8. You can join us@pivotmethod.com Insider by supporting the show. As you know, I have pivoted to daily. It is a labor of love. I do love it and I love all of you and any support you can give during this time is much appreciated, but certainly not required. The other live event is LinkedIn live with Dori Clark, my business bestie. That's happening on Thursday, April 9th at 1pm Eastern. If you want to get the details, you can go to pivotmethod.com live or or follow me or Dory on LinkedIn and you'll see when we start to go live, we're going to be talking about pivoting and reinvention. We always joke that our books are business book doppelgangers because of the nature of the material, so we're just going to riff. Dori and I have been having huddles with each other and various friends throughout this time and I always love getting her take on things. I have a feeling you will too.

In the previous two episodes, Dr. Michael Consuelos and I talked about the jobs data, the unemployment claims, and sure enough, just as we've been saying, as soon as we hit record and I had the episodes for Friday and Saturday ready to go live, the new unemployment data came out. So Here in the US 10 million people have now filed for unemployment. This is affecting all of us. If you haven't been affected yet, I really encourage you to tune in. And I'm not saying to do that to be scared, but learn from others who have been, because I do think we're going to continue to see ripple effects and dominoes that affect second, third, fourth layers of our economy, of our jobs and of our careers. Beyond that, I have friends who are pregnant. I have friends who are slated to get married this year and already had the wedding and the venue and everything planned. I have friends who have family members who are sick, both with coronavirus and those where their family members are ailing and they can't go visit. There's so much going on. We've talked in recent episodes about the principles of comparative suffering and ambiguous grief. All of us on a collective are feeling this. My heart hurts sometimes I wake up and my heart hurts for everybody.

We talked about that in the episode on being an empath and HSP during this time. Highly sensitive person with Sarah Santa Croce. All I can say to that is give yourself permission to feel all the feelings. We are all strapped into a roller coaster and some days I wake up and I feel super hopeful and energized and healthy. And then other days I wake up and I feel that the roller coaster is just lurching me from side to side to side and it can be hard to stomach. On a personal level, I am staying buoyant, definitely. And I have to say, for somebody who I've spent the last really decade of my life studying change and how do we navigate change. I do feel that we have an unprecedented front row seat to study that exact thing. Although even for me, in just the last week I lost two more big contracts, which is a loss of 90% of my projected income for Q2, including money that I had been planning on putting directly into a six month business reserves account long before the pandemic hit. I had these contracts slated. I knew, okay, I really need to stock my business reserves. So as soon as I get that money, that's where it's going. And sure enough, so many of the companies that I do business with have been affected. There are some where their entire teams are furloughed. There are others where their entire B2C the business to consumer aspect of what they're doing is frozen. Even clients like Google have to navigate a hundred thousand people working from home now. And psychologically speaking, people aren't necessarily in the mood for training, if you know what I mean. This is a time to buckle down and adapt. Someone put it really well on a call I had yesterday, especially for people who have young kids at home, that for so many people with families, this is not even a shift to working from home. It's basically navigating your family life while trying to get a little bit of work done when you can. Those are not my words. So I want to give full credit, but I don't want to name names. We have to give ourselves permission that this is affecting everybody on such a deep level. When I say that I've lost 90% of my projected income, you better believe that has been shocking. It is a practice not to go into panic, to stay optimistic, to stay abundant, to stay grateful. At least I didn't lose the other 10%. At least I have the skills and the drive to be creative. Because what is entrepreneurship? It is about creativity, problem solving and navigating immense uncertainty, constant uncertainty. So even for me, that practice continues daily. And it's hard not to want to cry when the next news comes in. And yet pretty quickly reminding myself of the Buddhist saying that nothing is permanent, personal or perfect. If we are still holding on to the notion that anything going on right now has to do with us personally is some kind of value judgment, throw it out the window. Nothing is permanent. This feels pretty permanent right now. We're all in the middle of it. We can't really see the end in sight yet no one knows. Even the experts don't know what this is going to turn out to be and when. And nothing is perfect, certainly now. So if we ever had to have a lesson in self compassion and dropping attachment, surrender, faith, gratitude, we are all getting a heaping serving of those lessons right now. We are also all getting a black belt in pivoting. I've been saying this when I've been delivering pivot sessions on one on one calls. We are getting a black belt right now. Whether you signed up for it or not. We are all getting that skill and I guarantee you you will be better and more resilient at navigating change when and as we get through this, One more thing I will say I did end up applying for the newly released Small Business COVID 19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan. That's the official name from the government. It's also been called the Payroll Protection Plan Loan. Despite having initial hesitations, I kept saying, well, there are so many people who need this more than me. At the same time, I had friends, most of them that I asked for a second opinion, said, don't be crazy. This loan is exactly for small businesses like you that have lost the majority of their income and want to keep themselves on payroll or employees, team members getting paid. And I've been really hesitant to cut my team because we've just gotten things so beautifully optimized and we're already super lean as it is. I'm going to put that link in the show notes, but if you do run a small business or know somebody who does, send them to covid19relief.sba.gov that's covid19relief.sBA as in small business administration.gov.

Now let's come back to this black belt for a moment. I have been trying to journal through this. I have kept journals since I was in middle school daily, although I'd fallen off over the last year or two. So I'm returning to my both five star notebook, which I've used five star notebooks for almost 15 years now, and this new five year daily journal that I'll put in the show notes. It's one of those where it's a five year journal and you write one sentence for a given day. So like the day might say Sunday, April 5th and then there's five chunks for text. So 2020, April 5th, 2021, 22, 23, 24. I feel like now is as good a time as ever. So even if you don't want to write longhand and do free writing or morning pages from the Artist's way, maybe you just want to write a couple sentences. This is such a powerful time that we're living in and I make a point to write there's about five lines for each year, which is crazy. It's not much, it goes fast, but I try to write three lines about the day and then two lines of gratitude. So at least three things that I'm grateful for. That brings me to the reflection questions. These have been very helpful for me and others I've shared them with and I'm making a point not to share my analysis with you yet, at least on this episode because I want to give you the space to reflect completely on your own without any influence from my responses. That said, I am happy to share what I've reflected on so far about one month into the real intensity of it for me here in New York City in a future episode. And I also really encourage you to listen to the episode on Beautiful Questions with Steve Morris. We've gotten great feedback on that one so far, and I just have a feeling that you'll get a tremendous amount of value far beyond the questions themselves. But how Beautiful Questions can reorient your entire life trajectory? For show notes on that one, go to pivotmethod.com 173These questions are a little more functional and in the moment some of them may turn into beautiful questions. But here we go. They're across three categories Personal, professional, and moving forward. In the personal category, what did you do well personally to prepare or be prepared? That can be in terms of financial, health, pantry, emergency supplies, mentally, emotionally, practices you've had, family setup, family communications. So number one, what did you do well personally to prepare? Number two, what did you miss?

What were some things? This takes us to number three, what would you do differently next time for a pandemic or major economic contraction or other emergency?

So to recap on personal what did you do well, what did you miss and what would you do differently next time?

The next section Professional now this was a true and is a true Black Swan event, which Nassim Talev describes as an event that comes as a surprise, has a major unexpected effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. In short, we could say that a Black Swan event, when you hear that shorthand, is unpredictable or unforeseen with extreme consequences. So that said, even Nassim Taleb would say, okay, we could all prepare professionally for this exact pandemic that just occurred, but we still wouldn't be prepared for the next Black Swan event, whatever that is. So with all caveats aside, we could still reflect whether you work for an organization, maybe you were laid off or furloughed, and if so, my heart's going out to all of you right now. Maybe you're self employed and you're still riding that super rocky roller coaster. So here are four questions to reflect on professionally. 1. How are you well prepared or well set up for this? Professionally? What are you proud of?

Number two, what did you miss? What would you do differently next time?

Number three, what can you shift right now or what are you being asked to shift professionally.

And number four, what is this time calling you toward professionally? We have all been pivoted, so we could leave it at that and say, well, I had no choice in the matter. My work has changed dramatically and I don't want this. Or you could ask the question, what is this calling me toward? I've shared in previous episodes, what is your call to serve? You might not know right now. You might feel overwhelmed and unproductive. As my longtime mentor Susan Bialy just wrote in a article for Psychology Today, I'm going to put that in the show notes. We've mentioned it in a recent episode. But as you start to move past the overwhelm and the that feeling of feeling unproductive, maybe there's a calling in here for you. Even if the calling is just to rest or to take a pause, to take a break. Maybe there's something else that you feel called to do during this time, called to serve in some way.

And of course, all of this goes without saying that we're right in essentially at the beginning of all this. So these questions, I see us reflecting on them on a monthly basis. And certainly if we can even say that this quote ends, who knows when that will be at the tail end of what's going on, too. To recap those professional questions one more time, one, how are you well prepared for this professionally? What are you proud of? What did you miss? What would you do differently next time? Number three, what can you shift right now? And number four, what is this time calling you toward.

The last section, moving forward, Number one, how can you be even kinder and take even better care of yourself?

Number two, what change or personal evolution are you still resisting? Maybe there's the old way, the old business, the old contracts, the old role that you used to have, the old habits, the old way of thinking. So, number two, what change or personal evolution may you still be resisting in this moment? What attachment could you let go of next? Number three, what lessons does life continue delivering? Imagine what if your personal and unique experience of all of this was custom built for you. You're the main character in the movie. We are all rooting for you. You are on an epic hero's journey of this pivot in progress. What lessons is life really deeply encoding in you right now as we speak? Number four, given that we just kicked off a new month, a new quarter by the end of this next month, what will make you proud to look back on in terms of how you handle things and how you take care of yourself and others this month? Number five. Last question what is your intuition guiding you toward just one next step? And trust that you'll always know and be shown the one next step after that. To recap the Moving Forward section more quickly, Number one How can you be even kinder? Take better care of yourself? Number two what change or personal evolution are you still resisting? Number three what lessons does life continue delivering or encoding upon you? 4. At the end of this month, what will make you proud to look back on in terms of how you handle things and take care of yourself and others? And number five what is your intuition guiding you toward just one next step.

For the intuition question? I love asking myself that every day before I start the day. What is my intuition guiding me toward today? What is the one thing I can do today that would have the most impact?

I hope you found these questions helpful. I would love to hear your feedback and if there's anything you want to share for a future episode, leave me a voice note@pivotmethod.com.

And one more time, if you want to join us for the live Q and A with Penny Pierce this Wednesday, go to pivotmethod.com insider. And if you want to join for the LinkedIn Live with Dorie Clark on Pivoting and Reinvention that's happening Thursday, April 9th at 1pm Eastern. You can learn more and get redirected to the page@pivotmethod.com live. You can find the show notes to this episode and these questions written out@pivotmethod.com 180. Baby, we're at 180 episodes of this podcast and I am so grateful that you're here listening. That's pivotmethod.com 180 stay safe and sane everybody sending you light and love.

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Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.