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This post is part of a series focused on managing the career and life impact of COVID-19. If you’d like to start with the first post, which focuses on breathing, getting calm, and completing a Life Wheel to start balancing your life, click here.
Taking Control
Doesn’t that sound comforting? The thought that you can manage something, anything, in this unprecedented time period? And there is a lot of helpful advice available about taking control right now. This excellent post in Psychology Today by Dr. Loren Soeiro focuses on how to control your anxiety and offers helpful suggestions like turning off the 24-hour news, being judicious in your use of alcohol, eating a healthy diet, etc.
Other articles focus on the classic statement of “control what you can control.” By identifying what we can and can’t control, we are able to stop focusing on things like the coronavirus, and instead, focus on how often we wash our hands.
Calming Down
In the career world, this “control what you can control” comes down to identifying what is within your power—your locus of control. You cannot control whether you are laid off. You cannot control if your business is shuttered due to city or state regulations. To tell someone not to focus on that isn’t very helpful. Of course, you are going to focus on that. Of course, you will feel anxiety and a million other emotions connected to those events. The understandable reactions of shock, surprise, and feeling overwhelmed.
If that’s where you are, that’s where you are. You don’t need to fight those emotions. Sit with them and breathe through them. You can control your breath and sitting and breathing through them will help. As you breathe slowly, in and out, repeat a simple mantra like “I am breathing in” and “I am breathing out.” Or, “I am breathing in love and light” and, on the out-breath, “I am letting go of fear.”
Managing Your Thoughts and Emotions
Once you stop fighting those feelings, it can be easier to move into the next stage of facing them, and deciding what your next course of action will be. One of the best therapeutic systems for managing (and, yes, taking control of) the thinking that often accompanies anxiety and other strong emotions is cognitive-behavioral therapy. There are a ton of good books on cognitive behaviorism, and you can likely find some for free from your public library’s e-book collection. I checked my local library, for instance, and found over 100 e-books or e-audiobooks available for downloading without having to visit the library. Two standout titles included the downloadable audiobook versions of the Great Courses cognitive-behavioral programs and Retrain Your Brain: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in 7 Weeks: A Workbook for Managing Depression and Anxiety by Dr. Seth Gillihan.
Some of you may be thinking that you’re too agitated or upset to read a book. That’s understandable. But an interesting phenomenon about cognitive behaviorism is that sometimes just reading about it, and learning how to challenge your thinking, can help you feel better. Even short articles that help you retrain your thinking patterns can greatly reduce your anxiety or other feelings. Here’s a helpful Psychology Today website page that provides a lot of quick resources for you. Udemy offers inexpensive courses in cognitive behaviorism as well.
Using cognitive-behavioral techniques like disputing your automatic thoughts and taking action instead of “thinking” about things will help you feel more in control.
Controlling Your Actions
But there’s still another layer to this “control” issue, and it can be found in the writings of Stephen Covey. In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey discusses classic time management systems that we’ve all been taught to use. He describes what he calls “third generation” time management systems which focus on controlling time by planning it, scheduling it, and managing it. And to a certain level, the techniques work. We generally do better and achieve goals when we plan and schedule and manage our time.
But, what happens when things aren’t manageable? What happens when people around us don’t behave the way we want? What happens when events like COVID-19 come along and we lose a great part of our control? This, says Covey, is where our principles come in. He suggests that we focus on determining what is most important in our lives and using that as our guide, not outside events.
To illustrate his concept, picture a target with three concentric rings. On the outside ring is the “Circle of Concern.” When you are living in the “Circle of Concern” you are more reactive and focused on events outside yourself over which you have no control. He describes this area generally as a waste of effort because we can’t control it. We tend to stay paralyzed and unable to act when we're in this circle.
The next ring in the target is the “Circle of Influence.” In this circle, you focus on what you have the power to change or do differently. You start to develop short-term or long-term solutions to your challenges. You come up with new ideas as to how you could earn a living, or what you could do instead of your current work. This is a better place to “live” in your mind because it opens up ideas and creativity.
But the best place is in the center of the target (bullseye) which is what he calls “the Circle of Focus.” As he writes on page 150 in his book, First Things First: “… the most effective use of our time and energy is generally in … the Center of Focus. In this circle are the things we’re concerned about, that are within our ability to influence, that are aligned with our mission, and are timely.”
Think about that for a moment. Within your current job situation, what are you able to influence? What is aligned with your mission—with your beliefs and your purpose? And what actions would be timely to take right now?
By moving to your Circle of Focus, you can set and achieve goals that will ultimately make you feel better and, ironically, in control. So what goals do you need to set now? What goals might help you feel better? What will help you feel more in-control despite the situation outside? What actions could you take today?
Make a point of taking a day or so to think about your mission: what is important to you. Review the life wheel you created from my last post, and decide what actions you could take today to help yourself move forward. Don’t pile on too many “to-dos.” Recognize that this is an unusually high-stress period so select actions you can take today that will be meaningful, helpful to your ultimate goals or mission, and comforting and self-compassionate. (One goal hint: Consider going to your library’s website and downloading an e-book or an audio e-book on cognitive behaviorism.)
What we’re doing now is mapping out an immediate plan. Taking control of today, and then tomorrow, and then the next day. From the last post, you’ve analyzed your overall life and perhaps started to bring more balance. Now it’s time to focus on your employment situation and decide what is needed today to help move forward. What steps will you take today?
©2020 Katharine S. Brooks. All rights reserved.
References
Covey, Stephen R. (1994). First Things First. New York: Simon & Schuster.
