As our economy is slowly starting to open, I think many of us might look back at the past few weeks and think: “I could have done more.”
Everyone has a different experience during this time. Whether you’ve been working on the front line, working from home or doing your part and staying home, we’ve all had time freed up from things that have been taken away.
I have been working from home and trying to homeschool my child, and it has been exceptionally busy trying to knock everything off our lists. Even among the busyness there has been a significant amount of time freed up. Many of our weeknight and weekend activities are on hold, our favourite places closed and visits with friends limited to short visits in a yard.
I am a person who enjoys working toward a goal. In this time of uncertainty, I find establishing goals within my reach and control, comforting. It gives me something to work toward, channel my energy, fill up empty hours and if all goes well, a sense of accomplishment. For me, I’ve doubled up on online classes and taken time to work on new projects with my daughter, but I always think I could have done more.
We’ve all seen posts on social media saying we should be kind to ourselves and it’s OK if we didn’t set out to learn a new language or skill during the past couple of months. I agree with that. Even during my interview with Dr. Bonnie Henry, she told me that parents shouldn’t be stressing too hard on the whole homeschooling thing.
As I spent a recent evening on YouTube searching up success and productivity videos (please don’t judge me for my dry entertainment choice), I stumbled across a gentleman named Brian Tracy who has his own enterprise on this topic.
He said something that stopped me in my tracks and changed the way I think I am going to approach things from now on. He said that most people think to be successful you need to be miles better at something than other people. I admit it, I have totally thought that before, and it’s even deterred me from trying things.
Here’s where Tracy blew my mind. He said you don’t need to find one thing that you are way better at than other people to be successful, but instead need to be one or two per cent better at many things.
I know not everyone enjoys a competitive nature, but this is something we can all do within ourselves.
This changes my mind frame about looking back on these few weeks of quarantine. Don’t stress about what you have or haven’t done.
Assess where you are and then make the goal to improve by one per cent. It’s small and attainable. When you’ve reached that one per cent, try and improve by another one per cent increment.
Eventually, the small measurements will add up and success will surely follow.
If you look at the past few weeks, there could quite possibly be things that you have already improved on by at least one per cent, such as teaching your kids math, working from home or even making bread.
As I jumped down a YouTube rabbit hole, Tracy offered another interesting tidbit for success that I think is fitting as businesses reopen to the public.
He shared that a key to being successful is having many contacts, and suggested that for every person you meet, you ask them what they do, and for their business card.
The magical part of his advice is not to even think about what that person can do for you, it’s for you to think: “How can I help them?”
Take the card and then try to find someone you can send their way. The thought is if you send a customer to your new contact’s business, they will remember you and try and return the favour.
But I think it is good practice in general, regardless if you get any return. It seems quite timely as we want to ensure local businesses can recover.
I think it would be great if we can celebrate our local businesses by sharing their contact info and passing on a good word.
Charla Huber is the director of communications and Indigenous relations at M’akola Housing Society.
