Mental Wellness in a Covid Crisis – How to swim not sink
Last year on the 23rd March 2020 the Prime Minister of the UK announced that all the inhabitants of all four countries in Britain (Wales, Scotland, Ireland and England) would be going into immediate lockdown.
I am Welsh, live in Cardiff and at that point I had been having a lot of success with my self-penned one woman show about the French singer Edith Piaf called ‘Passionate about Piaf’, which I had recently performed in London’s West End to great acclaim. 2020 was going to be the year when we built on that success and my production company had numerous concerts lined up and we were hoping to perform the show in Glastonbury, The Edinburgh Fringe and internationally. However that was not to be. Little did we know at that point, that the pandemic would still be having a major effect worldwide, sixteen months down the line.
Fortunately for me, for the last forty years, I have always had two parallel professional careers – in creativity and knowledge sharing and I work as a master life, leadership and public speaking coach. I had done some international work by Skype but not an awful lot by that point and it was mostly in person.
On that day I realised I, and every other person in the country had a choice – I could sink or I could swim. I could sit around watching Netflix, eat donuts, get fatter and complain all year or I could use this strange new time as an opportunity for growth – which is the option I chose.
So having had a bit of a think, I decided to launch the alternative BBC – that is, the ‘Bathroom Broadcasting Coach’ – not for any other reason than the bathroom was the only wall I had in the house which didn’t have a painting or a photo on it and by the end of the first day the first ‘podcast’ was broadcast on youtube. I went on to do 74 daily episodes and it certainly kept me focussed on doing something positive which could help others in this immensely challenging time.
I covered all sorts of coaching topics from goal setting (How to eat an elephant) to ‘How to cope with good and bad days’ and finally finished my final edition which was called ‘One small thing’ which is a critical message for when you are absolutely at rock bottom and frozen with the inability to do anything to change your state. These videos are still on my youtube channel – go on, go and have a look to see if they can help you in any way. They are just as valid now as they ever were and I now have the content of a self-help book, ready to be worked on when I have the time. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL5kFg0P4DspkX8cwjw85RjiILzOR2dPB
And as in all unexpected adversity, we see the best and the worst of humanity. Neighbourhoods came together in new ways through ‘What’s app’ groups and very, very quickly we all learnt how to use that magical machine which created new friendships and world-wide collaborations – the all-powerful earth embracing Zoom Room.
It has enabled me to network with people from literally the four corners of the world. I no longer see my potential as within the United Kingdom – no, now the world literally is accessible to me from the comfort of my tiny office in Cardiff, or even better, I can take my work with me when I care for my mother in West Wales or recently in a remote caravan in North Wales. We will all look back at this time as being as crucial to the development of all business, be that SME’s or large multinationals, as the industrial revolution will have been.
I worked as an Equal Opportunities and Diversity expert with the Welsh Assembly Government for about twelve years and there was so much resistance to remote home working – they didn’t believe the work could be done, they couldn’t trust their workers etc. etc. But what we have actually found is that people will complete their work effectively and they can be trusted. No more wasting hours in traffic, wasting time, energy, petrol and money – people have been literally going to their work in their pyjamas, some now even not venturing out of their beds to work.
But the negative side of all the remote working has been people who have been unable to cope with working on their own, of finding the discipline to get into work-mode, to be distracted by Netflix or household issues and finding that they really needed the structure and support from those working alongside them. I have worked on my own in a tiny office for all of my life so it didn’t present a challenge to me.
Recently I completed a ‘Mental Health First Aiders’ course and was astonished to hear that depression rates are twice as high now as they were this time last year, which is a very disturbing statistic. And this is even before we come out of the pandemic. There are so many issues which will have to be dealt with when we are able to control the disease – businesses which may no longer exist, redundancies, unreleased grief for those we have lost, the financial losses we have had to take and plans and dreams which never came to fruition.
So what could we and what can we continue to do to ensure we swim and not sink during these challenging times, the likes of which we have never ever seen before? Well it starts and ends with self-care and self-love. You can-not pour from an empty jug and we have all been pulled into so many different directions over the last sixteen months.
So – good food, exercise, sleep, get out in nature, learn about mindfulness, do some new things, make some new friends, be kind to someone without expecting to get anything back, be curious, do not get into the spiral of loneliness – reach out when you are struggling. All pretty simple things really and going back to Number 74 of my podcasts – ‘Do one small thing’ every day and by the end of a year all those 365 small things will have made a huge difference! And if you want to see some of the small things I have done over the last few months check me out here. https://linktr.ee/gwennodafydd
