Dear All

Do you remember the days when you used to travel?

Just think how much more time you now have back in your pocket to spend on other things?

Whichever way you respond, its likely to be on longer hours working, but hopefully more time with your immediate (lockdown!) family, maybe an exercise routine, a new hobby (that you can conduct at home), book reading, learning new skills, the list goes on. All that travel time that you now spend elsewhere……

But the subject of travel time is not the reason for this blog post, at least not directly, I’m doing some rather good training currently, it’s called “Dare to Rise”. It’s all about developing a growth mindset and attaining additional skills to provide a better and more attentive experience to friends, family, colleagues, and customers.

“Done it all before”, my old cynical brain said to itself at the outset…. But with all this travel time to spend on other things I decided to drop in and have a go.

16 weeks of commitment to 15-30 minutes a day. About the time it would take to get to the motorway from my house in those old days of travel. No problem….

Two months in and after a very successful month one, with everything completed as per instructions on a daily basis, I find myself at the second cohort call (it’s when we gather together in a small group, share notes and brainstorm) on month 2 with let’s just say quite a few days to catch up on. In fact, around about a full-length journey to the office in London, at least 3 plus hours!!!

The very first session on my catch-up journey just happens to be on the subject of planning with 23 reasons (Yes….23!) on why you should plan and a task to reflect on why planning is personally relevant to me.

I wrote this as the answer to the question off the top of my head……

“I always have a lot on, my role at work demands that I get involved in a lot of stuff, it means that I need to prioritise and focus, which tends to be a weakness of mine as I find it hard to say no sometimes. I also have a busy home life, with family and friends and several diverse interests, all of which need some form of plan to ensure that they all dovetail together nicely. It’s been easier in this respect this last 13 months as I haven’t had to add the travel factor in the equation.

That in many ways was the most complicated element of planning. We will all need to carefully re-integrate this back into our lives at some stage. Maybe not in the way that we used to, but for sure it will reiterate the need for adjusting the way we plan….”

It wasn’t until I got halfway through the answer that it really dawned on me that we are going to have to re-adjust our planning, not only for ourselves but for everyone else around us. It will in fact incorporate both planning and tolerance.

Whilst we are all (mostly) stationary we can all jump into lots of meetings on a range of subjects every day, in fact we tend to take that for granted now,  I certainly feel that I let people down if I can’t attend and also get a little frustrated when people are not available for my meetings.

I’m sure that we will need to adjust our mindsets as we emerge again into the big wide real world as we factor travel back into our planning. It may not be travel as we knew it (and that’s a good thing) but it will be back and that means we will also need to practise tolerance and understanding as well.

It’s going to be interesting…

Best Regards

Mark in the Pink Caravan HQ, Chedzoy, Somerset, England