What Branches Are You Growing?

It’s been said numerous times that the pandemic has changed us.

It’s changed the way we interact, the way we operate, the way we think about the future, and there’s no debate that it changed the way we work.

A year ago, zoom fatigue was simply not a thing. The way that you now approach your day, your work and your team would have been unimaginable just twelve months ago.

I’ve also observed some pretty dramatic personal shifts happening.

I have nine colleagues who have moved during the pandemic—downsizing, upgrading or relocating entirely. Others are noticing shifts in terms of their professional focus or their aspirations for the career they are building and the impact they seek to have in the world.

Last January, in the 'Before times', I kicked off an engagement with a client. A high-performer, her world was an intricate web of tending to an ambitious career that was heavy on business travel, making time to be with her young family, and nurturing the desire to be grounded and always show up at her best for clients, family and friends.

Time felt like a scarce resource for her.

Although unplanned, the pandemic arrived like a well-trained arborist, clipping away many of these limbs and grounding her firmly in the here and now—the trunk and root system that supported her loftiest ambitions.

This natural opening enabled us to dive into the way she had been approaching and thinking about her time. We identified deeply held beliefs, articulated time principles and created guardrails to guide her as she translated her aspirations into real world changes and results.

Over the course of the pandemic, my client made some shifts.

She decided she wanted to build on her old way of doing things, not “let go” of what came before. She wanted to take the experience and knowledge she’d earned and extend it towards new and exciting places for her work. 

In other words, she wanted to strengthen the branches she had grown over the course of her career. 

Building from these branches, she wanted to extend into interesting new places and work experiences.

She wanted to move towards work and projects that energize her.

She wanted to ground herself by setting limits around her availability, so that she could show up as both the leader she knew she was capable of being and as the kind of human being she liked to be around.

Often, we find ourselves asking binary questions — what do I want to start and what do I want to stop doing? What is bad and what is good?

For many of us, the lessons and insights we’ve uncovered in this time mean that we don’t want to go backward. Sure, we may crave the normalcy and freedom of 2019, yet many of us deep down don't want to revert to that life entirely.

But what if we opened up our line of questioning, and thought about our work in terms of branches on a tree, so that as we grow in new areas we are still supported by that which came before?