We will be returning to work in our “new normal” in about a month, so for the next few weeks the blog will explore this topic from different angles.  The hope is that if we can do some of this thinking now, we can set ourselves up for more success once we are in the thick of things.  Today, we will focus on Legos and rebuilding vs. reimagining.

My daughters sometimes play with Legos outside in the garage.  Recently, we cleaned the garage and all the Legos that were out.  Violet was upset about this and said things like, “Do you know how long that took me to build?  Do you know how long it will take me to rebuild?”  After calming her down, we talked to her about how this is a fresh start, and that she doesn’t have to rebuild the same things.  Instead, she can reimagine, building something completely new.  This is exactly what she did.  She redesigned and built entirely new structures, even better and more creative than before.

What does this have to do with anything?  I feel like so much of the conversation about moving forward is focused on getting back to normal.  It’s about finding ways to rebuild what we had, reinstating our old lives brick by brick.  Instead, I wish we spend more time reimagining what life could be.  Let’s be honest with ourselves.  There were a lot of things that weren’t serving us in the world before COVID.  If anything, this pandemic has exposed some of these flaws across all aspects of our life (personal, social, mental, emotional, spiritual, political, and work).  Now that we see those shortcomings, we can do something about them.  Similar to the story about Legos, we don’t have to rebuild brick by brick.  We can reimagine our live instead.  We can take inventory of our lives now and decide what we want to keep and what we want to leave behind.  We can design a new life that is better for all of us as individuals and for all of us as a whole.  We can also redesign the way we work to make it better for everyone.

The challenge: How will you reimagine your career and your life as things get back to “normal”?

Extra thoughts: As I’m reimagining work I’m noodling on some of the following topics: How can I continue to keep/restructure my time to practice self-care?  How do I ensure I don’t lose some of my physical fitness routines as I go back to work?  How do I reimagine what I expect from bosses, teammates, and the company as I go back?  How do I reimagine and reinforce my boundaries?  How do I rethink what success looks like at work and in life?  How can I be purposeful about engineering new habits that will serve me positively instead of falling into old habits that might make me comfortable while not necessarily helping me?  What relationships do I want to invest in and which ones do I want to let go of?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry