You’re at the office in a meeting with an important client when your cat saunters across the conference table and stretches butt-in-the-air. Then your 2 year old daughter bursts into the room screaming, and your partner comes running after her in his underwear. At that moment you realize you can’t stand up because you’re wearing pajama pants.
Nine months ago, this would have sounded like someone retelling a nightmare, but it’s not an uncommon occurrence on professional Zoom meetings today.
People are doing their best to recreate a stable office environment and prevent interruptions, but we have more visibility into each others’ personal lives than ever before. Here’s why I love it.
We took the pressure off each other.
When we know what other people are going through, it helps us. I sent a comprehensive proposal to a client and didn’t hear back for a couple days, but I wasn’t worried. She had told me she was helping her husband through intense cancer treatments. She didn’t feel pressured to get back to me right away because I understood her situation and told her to take as long as she needed.
We discovered our commonalities.
After you go through a personal growth period, you recognize when other people are taking the same journey. I was chatting with a client who seemed unusually upset about working out for the first time in years and arranging a complicated holiday schedule. I followed the clues and made a leap; I told him holidays are tough for me since my divorce. Relieved to find a kindred spirit, he confessed what I had surmised: he was stressed because he was navigating his first holiday divorced with kids.
We acknowledged our shared humanity.
We can share our struggles, as well as our solutions. When I ask, “How are you?”, clients finally feel empowered to admit what is stressing them, and we talk about ways to cope. I encourage everyone to check out the Headspace meditation app, and I share crock pot recipes for easy dinners.
We practiced gratitude.
While we’re pining for how things used to be, we’re also witnessing people experience devastating losses. Organizations have noticed this, too. This Wednesday I got three emails in a row from different companies with “Gratitude” in the subject line. We gained a new perspective on what’s going well for us, and we’re able to give some of our newly-recognized abundance to people who need help.
2020 will forever be the year we realized we’re all working together.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
