While working from home can feel pretty isolating, it can also be a great journey of self exploration. The other day I heard the great author Pema Chodron refer to the opportunity of self-isolation as creating a personal inner retreat for yourself if you choose to devote time to it. While work and learning can be focused so much on the company or learning a new skill, how about learning about your own inner world? Learning more about you and how you operate?
When there is a pause or silence we tend as humans to want to fill it. What if for 15-30 minutes each day we didn’t? This can be a time where you can access learning about who you are more fully and completely.
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Meditation can be the access for some, a walk in nature may be the access for others. What I would recommend is journaling curiosity questions to get yourself into a space of empathy, inquiry and learning more about yourself. Just think of it as an inner world training to really hone listening to your own internal voice.
Here’s how it would go…let’s say today you feel frustrated. Well take a moment and journal open ended questions such as – what is contributing to me feeling frustrated? Then allow yourself to freely write whatever comes up for you. Allow yourself to answer and then ask another question. For example, let’s say you write “frustrated” and you ask yourself “what is contributing to me feeling this way” – and you write, I’m working harder than I ever have been and I’m tired and exhausted. The company said they weren’t going to schedule meetings past 5:30pm and it’s as if no one even put out an email mandating this. While the company says they care about us now, it feels like they simply want us to keep going. Questions you could ask yourself after could be – what am I assuming about the situation or senior leadership? What can I control? What can’t I control? What have I tried to solve this? What boundaries could I put in place? What resistance do I have to putting those boundaries in place?
What you are doing is discovering where your resistance is, where your blockages are and why. You are allowing yourself to freely express and find the opportunities in the face of what you may perceive to be a challenge or a tough situation or even a happy situation. By facilitating your own internal dialogue you can help yourself move from stress to empowerment and to discover further what makes you tick.
The goal of doing this is not to necessarily get to an answer. You may actually get to many “aha” moments simply by allowing yourself to discover how you feel and operate, and that in itself would be the gift.
If you are interested in digging deeper in what we talked about, the best next step is to fill out our Needs Assessment. I’ll be happy to connect with you. And remember…Better Leaders, Better People, Better Results.
