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Lockdown 2.0 – Change fatigue!

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The challenge

Lockdown 2.0 has triggered change fatigue in many of us, because it is a great example of “here we go again”. The problem with the need to repeat the great sacrifices and personal restraint we showed the first time, is that we must dig deeper to find the rationale. We put all our effort into the first lockdown, but it hasn’t worked. We doubt the benefits of repeating our actions whilst also knowing how much mental energy is required (which we didn’t know the first time around). It is harder to climb the mountain when you know how high and how difficult it is going to be, because our bias for underestimating a challenge cannot be applied!

The antidote is to increase our resilience, to drown out the negative thoughts. Emotional resilience is the persistence in pursuing a course of action despite obstacles and setbacks. It is our determination to see something through to its conclusion, despite the pressure we feel to quit.

I attended a wonderful lecture on resilience last week that inspired this analogy: If I think of my life as driving an electric car, resilience is the amount of battery power that I have available to me. The more my battery is charged, the further I can drive and the more places I can visit. I choose how frequently to re-charge my car and I choose how long I leave it on charge for. If I don’t increase the charge, I will eventually come to a halt.

So I need to invest some effort in charging my battery! For Lockdown 2.0 these are some of the things that I am doing to boost my resilience. They are all simple to do and don’t take much effort because the cruel reality is that when we are low, we don’t have the reserves needed to do the things that would make us feel better. This is why I have shown them on a scale of 1-10 where 10 is the highest level of energy needed, and 1 is the lowest:

It is shaming that I think doing exercise requires an effort of 10 out of 10 – but I still remember at the retirement party of my old PhyEd teacher, who said it was pupils like me that made her glad to retire!!!

Anyway, use these categories to trigger your own ideas:

  • With others and alone
  • New things and comfort of the familiar
  • Work and home related achievements 

If you want more information about resilience, join me on my next Agile Change Agent course when creating the emotional resilience for change is an important element of the training. Get a 40% discount by using the discount code Covid40 – my way of sharing the pain of this awful year, as a crisis is not the time to make a profit.