What Have You Learned About Yourself?
This COVID-19 pandemic certainly has been a real learning experience for everyone on this planet since it’s something we as humans have never encountered before. We are all learning about how quickly the virus can infect and all the actions we have to take to prevent infection such as physical distancing.
However, this pandemic hopefully has given us an opportunity to also learn more about ourselves. So the question I have for you is — what have you learned during this COVID-19 pandemic about YOURSELF?
I’m going make this a two question self assessment because that was just the first question. The second question once you’ve answered what you’ve learned about yourself is — what are you going to do about it (the knowledge you learned about yourself) moving forward?
If you haven’t learned anything about yourself or haven’t really even thought about it as you were probably too busy worrying about everything else that’s been going on with this pandemic, then you have lost a golden opportunity. But since the corona virus is going to stick around for awhile and the world will still be in pandemic mode for quite some time, there is still time for you to do this self reflection.
I’ll share a few things I’ve learned about myself over the last few months as an example of this self reflection.
What I’ve Learned About Myself During The COVID-19 Pandemic
The self isolation during since March has given me more time to pursue the activities I’m passionate about while at home. Even though my speaking and seminar business came to a standstill because of COVID-19, my publishing and real estate investment businesses were not that affected by the pandemic. So fortunately I was okay financially and was able to dedicate my hours to whatever I wanted as long as I could do them at home.
My sports activities like skiing and scuba diving had shut down since the industries in those fields shut down as well, as did the travel industry. All ski resorts and dive shops closed up plus flights were cancelled which effectively cancelled my May dive trip to Grenada. Luckily I have other interests as well.
Although our small dogs group also came to a halt, suddenly I was able to spend 24 hours per day with my aging Lhasa Apso dog Roxie. Even though she now sleeps much of the day, her hours awake have become really good quality time with her.
With the extra time I suddenly had, I wanted to use it well. Sure I did my share of TV binge watching but that was mainly at night. During the daytime, I put my hours into very productive use.
In addition to allocating about 45 minutes to an hour daily to learn Mandarin, I scheduled the equivalent of about half of my full daytime hours to another passion of mine which I haven’t been able to pursue much especially during my winter ski season. That passion happens to be music.
So since March, I’ve reignited my passion with music. This means guitar playing but also keyboard playing, songwriting and song arranging of both my original tunes as well as cover songs I wanted to play. On top of all this, I’ve also been building a home recording studio and started a huge music production project. As a result of lots of rehearsing, I’m now playing guitar better than ever.
A great thing about these music activities is that I can do most of them alone at home for now. In the future, I’ll play music with other people. For now even with spending so much of my days involved with music, I never get bored as I love every moment.
So the learning point here was that if I could be immersed in not only real passions, but those that I can do much of by myself, I will be quite happy whether there’s a pandemic out there or not. Yes I’ll continue with other passions like scuba diving and skiing but for those I need other people or a working industry like ski resorts to be open. But something like music can keep me busy on my own right at home. So with this realization, I’ve decided that I will keep continuing with my music passion for the rest of my life even after this pandemic is over.
The other main thing I learned about myself is how I want to spend my social time with others. I thought that as we slowly recover from the pandemic after months of isolation, I would be eager to do all sorts of socializing. But interestingly enough, this is not the case.
The months of social isolation gave me time to reflect upon recent years of my many social activities including my time as a Meetup group organizer when I met hundreds of different people. But like the name of a movie, there was some good, some bad and some even ugly social experiences I encountered. I learned that certain factors about the social environment and the type of people involved greatly influenced whether I enjoyed a particular social event or not.
Without getting into more details in this post, I obviously want to do what I can to make my future socializing to be good experiences rather than a mix which would include the bad and especially ugly moments. In the future, I’m going to become more choosy on where my social life goes. I’m going to be more selective on what types of activities I would be doing with others and who I would be doing these with. I won’t waste my precious social time with just any type of events and people just for the sake of socializing since these won’t contribute to high social enjoyment for me. So it’s a matter of quality over quantity.
So these are examples of my own self reflection and learning about myself from this pandemic so far. What about you? What have you learned about yourself and what are you going to do about it moving forward?
This pandemic has offered us an opportunity to make our lives better in the future by teaching us what is really important in our lives. So I encourage you to make use of this.
