The recent upheavals have sometimes spread disillusionment in our careers, anguish and ultimately a certain loss of meaning in our lives. How do we cope with this and how do we regain joy when we feel the ground beneath our feet?
It is not always easy to get caught up in these uncertain times. We want to hold on to something that keeps our curiosity alive while giving us a sense of progress. In front of all the possibilities offered to us by the Internet, we often feel dizzy and we simply find it difficult to project ourselves. This profusion of choices paralyzes us and provokes the opposite effect initially sought: we give in to a kind of laziness that is rooted in the inability to make decisions. Faced with current and future changes, we don’t really know where to turn. Is it necessary to learn a new skill to add to one’s palette? Is it necessary to develop one’s network? Should we look for soft skills that we were lacking? The time we have may be an opportunity to renew ourselves and even if we don’t know where to go.
The lack of interest we show in the use of our daily time is not just the result of a certain depression, it is above all linked to our lack of clarity. It is true that we cannot predict what will really happen in the months and years to come. Nevertheless, we can reasonably have some certainties on which to base our development strategy, whether personal or professional.
Our professional “market value” can be defined as a skillful combination of knowledge, skills and abilities. The common point between our personal and professional life is at a more subtle level, it is our psychology and ways of thinking. Our personal well-being is fundamentally linked only to our values and our adequacy with what we say and do. In these times of crisis, we can adopt a tactic of seeing the commonalities that exist between our professional and intimate identities. When we work to strengthen what binds these two entities together, our happiness becomes resilient and even anti-fragile, i.e. it can increase through the crises we go through. How is this possible? It may be true because our global (or transversal) identity takes advantage of crises to deepen its values and give them more meaning, like communicating vessels, one being that of our professional sphere, the other that of our personal dimension. When the professional dimension is threatened, the liquid contained in the vase – corresponding to our time and energy – would go into the one devoted to our personal life.
What are your values? To what extent do you thrive in spite of the circumstances?
It will not have escaped you that often our professional success is helped by our personal success whether it is psychic, emotional, family, friends or lovers. This works like a formula racing team: the racing driver cannot ignore the great contribution of his technical team to his victory.
The moment is perhaps that of strengthening you in the most intimate dimensions of your being. It can be a good exercise to learn how to control or explore your emotions, for example. If you invest your time, your energy and sometimes your money to know yourself better, this knowledge will serve you for a lifetime and it will be reflected on the different aspects of your existence.
Imagine that you are an elite athlete who can no longer compete. Continue to train, develop the different dimensions of your being that you can continue to keep awake even if some are more difficult than others (social life, etc.). To help you too, imagine that you are Robinson Crusoe and that you have limited resources to become the best version of yourself. Make do with what you have by trying to ignore your comfort level at the risk of otherwise plunging into a form of passivity.
