Staying Calm during COVID

We’ve talked about ‘Zoom’ fatigue, home working fatigue and frontline fatigue a lot over the past few months.

A dip into some research of the ‘re-opening phase’ as some are calling this stage, shows that some major UK corporations will only be able to have up to 50% of their workforce within their offices by Christmas. This way of working looks set to stay for quite some time.

Finding ways to help you work with this ongoing situation and keep your calm is vital to successful leadership and good mental health.

There’s one really simple technique that’s worked well in a number of situations for many people. One colleague uses this before public speaking when stepping onto a stage, when the amygdala takes over and the adrenaline kicks in.  

When this happens, your speech speeds up, your thinking isn’t focused in the right way and you might find it harder to make rational arguments.

By taking a mindful minute before that...

I recently heard someone say ‘People won’t remember what you did during the Coronavirus crisis, they’ll remember how you were.’

Never was a truer word said. At the end of the day, our attitude and the way we treated or family, friends and colleagues people will trump any amount of productivity and performance

A friend recently described to me how she had struggled with a really bad boss. Though he was a remarkable man with numbers, he was utterly terrible at anything involving people. 

He lacked empathy, patience, humility and was rather fond of belittling people for pleasure. 

The business itself was filled with some truly wonderful and talented individuals and his behaviour actually created a uniting force between the teams, a common enemy so to speak. 

She stayed in contact with many of her former colleagues and sadly, like many companies, theirs has been negatively affected by the COVID crisis with redundancies, displaced working and...

Fear is a hugely useful asset in the management of public safety.

To caveat this blog, this is not a political piece. Rather, it is an example of leadership and the lessons we can learn from Dominic Cummings outings and the handling of that news this week.

This week, I heard the use of fear within government leadership during the pandemic described as “it (fear) must wear an iron fist with a velvet glove”.

This week, it feels like the velvet gloves were accessorised with a hooded cape. ‘Rule of fear’ has now become ‘fear and loathing in lockdown Britain’.

As a democratic society, the value of our freedom is possibly one of our most important attributes. When we were instructed to stay home on the evening of the 23rd March, we accepted that this restriction on our liberty was for our collective safety.

We had no option but to put our trust in our leaders. And to their surprise, we the public followed the guidance with much greater compliance than...