Working and Schooling from Home - Use it to Build Meaning

Meaning is important, very important. The degree to which we feel that our lives have meaning, is closely related to the degree to which we can experience joy, connection and engagement. This applies to all areas of our lives from work to social, family to friends. Where there is a sense of meaning, experiences will be transformed from negative or ambiguous, to good. We will feel enriched.

One of the challenges of lockdown is that each day can merge into the next, and that can bring a sense of lethargy and listlessness leading to experiencing life as a futile pursuit. By consciously pursuing meaning, we raise our level of engagement and derive greater satisfaction from each day.

That is all very well, but in itself that knowledge is pretty pointless unless we know how to build meaning or how to build more meaning. Without the ability to build meaning, we are merely inactive participants getting hit by what life throws at us.

The positive news is that developing a sense of meaning is vital, and something we have agency over.

We’ve heard the What, and the Why, now for the How. Positive Psychology researchers have developed a wide array of interventions that help to build meaning, I am going to outline three here that can be used at home.

1. Pause for a few moments today to appreciate a moment of beauty. It could be something in nature or perhaps you have seen an act of goodness. Allow yourself to be immersed in that experience. Try to consciously be aware of beauty and goodness, it is there and you can access it.

2. Face something you have been avoiding or putting off. It could be sending an email or doing a piece of homework you are not looking forward to. Strengthen that muscle that enables you to face challenge rather than avoid it, and enjoy the experience of accomplishing things.

3. Do a kind act. It can be big or small. Perhaps it involves making a phone call or picking up some litter in the street. Try and make it a habit, and try not to tell anyone about it. The act itself is the reward.

I have worked with clients to build meaning and, whilst it is itself an end to be aimed for, it has brought with it many unforeseen benefits. Clients have become more engaged, motivated and confident. Their sense of connection has grown. They experience more energy and benefit from a sense of ease. Their days definitely don’t just merge into each other.

COVID Home-Schooling - Try optimism!

Read or watch the news for longer than a few minutes every day and you could easily be forgiven for thinking that there is little for us to be optimistic about, and if you understood where I was coming from with that statement, then you might want be about to change your mind about the truth of it.

Conventional thinking says that optimism is related to the circumstances of the time. Live in a time of pandemic and lockdowns, you will be pessimistic, live in a time of abundance, you will be optimistic. That’s not quite how it works though.

Humans find themselves on a spectrum, with complete pessimism at one extreme and complete optimism at the other. The complete pessimist thinks that nothing good will ever happen, and the complete optimist ALWAYS anticipates success. The states of mind are to a large degree independent of the circumstances.

Research has shown that optimists are healthier, more focused, and more successful in their careers than pessimists. That isn’t to say it is all good. A student who is too far to the extreme of optimist might think that they will never fail regardless of how little work they do, and for God’s sake don’t hand your pension fund over to the care of an optimist extremist, it might work but then again….

A good state to aim for is something called flexible optimism

Flexible optimism is when an individual learns how to be optimistic, and also develops the ability to apply it in situations when it is of benefit. It means that you don’t have to be subject to the oppressive weight of pessimism, or the reckless abandonment of unbridled optimism.

One method which can help to develop flexible optimism is to learn how to argue with yourself. Not out loud in public, that would be bad…very bad, but in the privacy of your own mind. When a pessimistic thought occurs such as, “I’m never going to get this job’’, ask yourself for evidence to support that statement. It probably won’t be there. But what if the evidence is there? Well that is an opportunity to de-catastrophise. Not getting the job doesn’t have to be the end of the world, it can be an opportunity for a better job at a better company. Over time, challenging a pessimistic narrative is life-enhancing and widens the horizons.

As a coach and Positive Psychology Practitioner, I get to use this approach in a formal setting and the results are excellent. As a parent, family member or friend, you can encourage this development tool by talking things through with your child or loved-one, and maybe you will both benefit from increased optimism, and all the other benefits that come from communicating with those we love.

COVID Schooling - Something to be grateful for?

If you saw the title and clicked on it then you probably fall into one of two categories. The vast majority of you will be curious as to exactly what level of idiocy could lie behind such a title, and the other person is my mum (hello mum).

Students should be at school. They should be with their friends. They should be sitting in front of highly-qualified professionals who know how to stretch and inspire them. They shouldn’t be on Zoom at the kitchen table, without the playground to look forward to. In other words, what is there to be grateful for?

Maybe there isn’t much, but perhaps it is worth trying to find something to be grateful for anyway.

Gratitude has been shown to increase happiness, lead to better health, enable people to build stronger relationships, and to build resilience amongst many other things. Given the immense benefit of experiencing gratitude, we are very fortunate to live in a time when Psychology has developed tried and tested ways of helping us to develop it as a trait.

One of these methods is called Three Good Things. Basically, you write down 3 good things that have happened each day. I have been working on a variation of this with some of the students I coach. We have been looking to identify 3 good things about working from home. The results have been impressive.

We start by acknowledging that this is not the ideal, and then we work towards finding some positives in the situation, and being grateful for them. In doing so, students are able to become more at ease with the reality of home schooling. In the background, they are also developing other traits which will serve them well in life. A big one is resilience. By moving through adversity, our students can with support, build resilience in a way which will help them a great deal in the future. This will enable them to meet challenges with a belief that they can navigate them. Building resilience is a life-changer, and gratitude is as good a way as any to build it.

The hope is that one day they will be able to look back from a point of achievement and say, “That really crazy hard time in 2020-2021 helped me to get here, and I am grateful for it.”

COVID Schooling - Going for a walk.

One of the challenges with working/schooling from home is the tendency to stay in the house all day for days on end. A benefit of going to work/school is that it gets us out of the chair and moving, and getting out of the chair and moving is not only great for the body, but great for the mind and spirit too.

Amongst (many) other things, walking has been shown to increase Positive Affect, and decrease your Negative Affect. In short, this means you experience greater joy, energy and enthusiasm and less sadness, lethargy and fear. So with this in mind, my 13 year old and I went for a walk today.

I could pick out any number of great things that happened on our walk but for brevity I will go for 3.

We spoke. That meant that we didn’t touch our phones*. At all. For the entire walk. In fact, hers stayed at home. It doesn’t even matter what we were talking about, it was just great to be able to talk….and listen…and feel the benefits. Listening to each word brings us into that moment and helps us to step away from future/past worries. It really is something to be grateful for.

We had things to talk about. Walking phonelessly outside, we got a break from the screen and saw, heard and even smelled (I won’t go into that but it made us laugh) things that we wouldn’t have seen, heard or smelt (honest), at home. These things stimulated conversation and went off into interesting tangents. Sometimes the home, with all the screens and other distractions, shuts down conversation rather than stimulating it, so going out was a welcome break from the numbing effect of the screen.

We had a laugh. I’ve linked interesting articles above from serious academic research. I could do that here too but I won’t, because when you laugh, and someone you love is laughing with you, it is transformative…for both of you, and we all know that, and it’s great.

*apart from starting a walking app at the beginning.

For the record, we also ended up walking 5 miles according the app, and that means I can have a some custard on my cake at the weekend!