My Unpopular Opinion about Coronavirus (DON'T WISH THIS TIME AWAY)

For many people, the time that we are experiencing right now with the coronavirus is a time of great pain and loss and tragedy. And I addressed if you are in that kind of extreme survival mode in my previous podcast episode and in my previous video, and I highly recommend that if that is you, you go and listen to that and learn about the idea of matching your expectations to your resources, which is one of the coping mechanisms and the way that I've understood getting through very tough times, crisis times, right? Realizing that our expectations need to adjust and that we need to celebrate those little successes and those little wins to kind of cheer ourselves through. Today, I wanna talk to you if you're not feeling like you're stuck in survival mode, but you're feeling a little bit confused about the things that are coming up for you. For example, I have lots of people admitting to me rather secretively that they're doing okay, that in fact they might even be enjoying this time somehow, that it's bringing out for them, you know, some great things in their marriages, in their parenting, in their work, just enjoying the fact that they have slowed down and simplified. And of course, everybody is experiencing some levels of anxiety, some levels of fear, some levels of pain and loss for others if not for themselves. So it doesn't go along with none of those things, it goes along with a complexity, right? With the fact that we feel both the worry and the fear and the loss for others, but also a kind of secret sense of satisfaction, of joy, of happiness, of gratitude for what is happening for ourselves. And that's what I wanna talk about here today. So if this is gonna feel triggering for you or unavailable for you, then I suggest you skip this one because today is gonna be all about the positivity and all about what we can take from this times. And maybe, just maybe, you're feeling very depressed and anxious right now, but this might be just the thing to kind of lift you out of that and swivel you around, kind of point you in a different direction in terms of your mindset, who knows? I wanna say, if it sounds manipulative or even exploitive to have fun while others are suffering, I want you to ask yourself, how does my suffering contribute to their happiness, right? You can't suffer enough to make somebody else not suffer. Joining someone else's suffering or suffering on their behalf doesn't actually help them. And you also have to ask yourself, am I taking advantage of others or am I simply finding the positive and finding the light in this situation? It's one thing to take advantage of other people's suffering, right? If someone was to go out and actually benefit from the fact that there's a virus, then that would be exploitive and manipulative and that is something to feel bad about. But if we are choosing to thrive through a crisis, not because of it, not from it, but through it, and if we are choosing to find the good in a bad situation or just let go and shed those labels altogether and just find the good in a neutral situation, then that is a wonderful thing and that actually benefits others and that actually helps them. You might be talking to other friends who are really, really struggling right now. And I know in my own coaching practice, I'm talking to people who are in much more dire and much more challenging situations than I. And I can walk away feeling like, oh, I'm fine, I have support, I have help, I have financial stability right now, I have a big enough home, I have a yard I can go out in, all the things that I have, I'm so privileged and I'm really set up for this time in an amazing way. We were homeschooling before, we had household help before, we had all this stuff set up and now we're okay and I can feel bad about that or I can feel grateful and responsible to use my privilege to further serve other people, right? To say, well, if I'm in a position where I can show up for people, where I can create content that helps, courses that help, guides that help, and really show up and support people and help people through that time and make sure that I'm still okay, that my team still has a job, that kind of thing, that's what I can do. And so I can take that energy and feel bad about it or I can take that energy into creatively being a problem solver. You might be at home and you feel certainly anxiety and frustrations and difficulty and challenges in the situation, but you also feel like, huh, I'm actually not so excited to go back to life as it was. I actually want this to go on a little while longer. And maybe you don't feel that quite so starkly, like quite so black and white. Maybe you feel like, I didn't quite love the rat race before. Maybe it's that you felt like you had too much on your schedule or you didn't love the rush of the mornings to get out of the door or you felt like you just didn't have enough time in your home together. Or maybe you felt really curious about your capacity to handle more time with your kids or even to homeschool and you never felt brave enough to try and suddenly you've been thrown into that reality. Maybe you felt like you never saw your partner before, if you have one, and suddenly you're really enjoying the time that you're spending together. We asked on our Facebook group, Love Parenting with Avital, and I very much invite you to join us there. It's an incredible judgment-free zone. We asked, has this time brought you closer together or further apart from your partner? And there were some people who were experiencing much worse partnerships and even divorce as a result of what they were experiencing throughout this quarantine together, but others found that the lockdown really brought them closer together, that suddenly their partners had so much more empathy for what they take on on a day-to-day basis or understanding of why a schedule is an important thing, you know, a rhythm and a daily flow. Suddenly their partners were very much more on board with them and they felt like a team and they could also spend so much more quality time together, even if it was with the kids around. So we asked and we realized that some people are finding a lot of benefits in that. Maybe you find benefit in the fact that you can suddenly do yard work or you can suddenly declutter your house in a way that you couldn't before or that you have time to just sit on the floor and play with your kids for long hours that you never used to have and that you're actually really enjoying. But alongside that, of course, none of us wanna be in lockdown. None of us wanna be in quarantine. We want to still have social experiences with others. We want to still go out and about. We want to make plans. We want to travel. We want to be free to move around and we want to see the people that we love most that we're currently not able to see. And so it's not like we're idealizing this time. It's not perfect. There's certainly a lot about it that we don't like, not to mention all of the people who are sick and who are losing their jobs and the recession and everything else that's going on. Of course, it's not like we are wishing that to continue. But alongside that, we are finding a lot of blessings, right, a lot of silver linings. And then we are kind of finding ourselves somewhat confused. Like, huh, is there something here? Is there some kind of something afoot in how I was living before? And is this perhaps a catalyst for awakening for how I might want to make adjustments to my life? It was forced upon me in a way that none of us wish. But here's the odd fact. Often, our greatest awakenings are forced upon us. It's that near-death experience that someone has that suddenly makes them realize they want to leave their job and start that business they always wanted, right? Or maybe it's someone who lost their job, was suddenly fired, and that was the catalystic event for them to realize that actually, they want to simplify their lives and they want to make do with less so that they have more time for the things that matter to them, like being with their children. Often, it's things that seem detrimental and awful and tragic and painful, and maybe they are all of those things, but they are also an invitation, an awakening, a catalyst, a moment of reckoning where we meet ourselves in the mirror and we're forced into the question, who am I? Who do I want to be? How do I want to live? How do I want to seize this life and seize this day? And that is what coronavirus is gifting all of us families. It is gifting us the opportunity to really meet ourselves in the mirror, to notice who we are as families and ask ourselves who we want to be. Are our relationships solid enough? Are we spending enough quality time together? Are we spending enough time at home? Hey, is this even the kind of home we want to live in? Is this the location we want to be, et cetera, right? And it's suddenly calling into contrast all of our choices, all of our decisions that sometimes didn't even feel like decisions before. I know for many of us, the job that we have feels like this default reality that we were kind of just thrown into, right, that we just kind of rolled into, and now it doesn't feel like a choice we're making. But coronavirus is hopefully showing you that it is a choice that you're making and that you do have other choices. Some of us feel like the school system, the education system is just the default choice. Like we don't have a choice in how to raise our children. They just have to go to school because that's the done thing. Well, hopefully now we're realizing, no, it doesn't have to be the done thing. There are other ways of living. And we may or may not choose to go back to it. And either way is okay. Either way is okay. What I'm trying to point out is that we should seize this opportunity to ask these questions, to notice what's coming up for us emotionally. We can choose to look at the coronavirus or any other experience, situation, fact of life. And we can look at that story and see only the awfulness. We can sink into anxiety. We can sink into depression. The world will be changed. Nothing's ever the same again. Look at all this unnecessary loss. Look at all the unnecessary tragedy. Look at all the unnecessary fear and anger and loss of life and loss of income, all the different things that people are losing and all the different spectrums of that. And we can sink only into that place. But my invitation to you is to realize that it is okay to see the beauty, to see the gifts, to reap the benefits that are to be had from this situation. No one would have wished it. No one would have chosen it. There are gifts to be had right now. We actually need to step into a creative role. When you are stuck in paralysis and stuck in anxiety and stuck in depression, you can't lead, but you're a leader. You're a parent. You have a family. And so you must lead. And to lead, we need to create the reality that we want. There are facts out there, like you can't leave your house or like people are suffering or like you've lost your job. There are facts, there are facts. I can't argue with the reality. There's no need to argue with the reality. How do we interpret it? What do we choose to focus on? That is our choice. The tagline of our membership, Present Play, is create family bliss. And that is because I see our role as parents as a CEO, the CEO of our family. We get to choose what we're gonna focus on in our families. We get to choose what kind of realities we're going to create. How are we gonna interpret this situation? Are you gonna interpret it based purely on the loss and the tragedy? Or are you also going to see the gifts that it's giving you as a family? Are you also going to take this opportunity to bounce forward rather than bouncing back? Maybe the reality you had before coronavirus hit was beautiful in some ways, but maybe this is the exact catalystic awakening that is going to throw the value of your life into higher contrast and make it more obvious to you where you wanna be spending your energy, what kind of work you wanna do in the world, what kind of parent you wanna be, what kind of life you wanna live, what kind of home you wanna have. This is the exact opportunity you've been waiting for to wake up and make those choices from a place of intentionality, of awareness, of consciousness, rather than the default. When you experience a coronavirus lockdown for a month with your family, or for more than a month, one of the things it can do for you and it can teach you is that you create the reality within your home. You get to choose how to spend your time, your resources, your focus. And so I'm calling you to action. Don't bounce back to your old life. Don't wish this time away. Don't just wait for everything to go away so you can go back to normal. Design and craft and decide what your new normal is. Reap the gifts of this time. Learn about yourself. Discover who you are as a family. Take note, mental notes, journal notes, of what is going on and how you wanna use this time as a catalyst, as a teaching opportunity to bounce forward into the next reality of you as a family. It may look the same as it used to, or it might look slightly or even very different. I have to mention a challenge. Do you know about this? I just wanna plug it in right here because if you haven't jumped on this challenge, then you're not seizing the day of this period, this time in history, because we have put together a free 21-day challenge and each day we're doing something small, something small to remind us of our creative powers, something small to get us in the driver's seat, to remind us of what we do control versus all of the many things we don't control. This challenge is absolutely free and it leads up to the opening of the Present Play membership, which only happens once a year. And as you know, for me, this is my life's passion. I am doing this, I've been doing this for years. Present Play is a membership with members from all over the globe, over 50 countries and we have over 1,200 members and we've had that well before coronavirus was even a thing. But since it has become a thing, suddenly everybody's banging our doors down because suddenly the importance of being home with children, of creating a home that is a play-inducing haven, of reclaiming independent play and of stepping into the CEO role as parents and feeling like we have a vision and we're crafting this incredible, blissful family experience at home, suddenly that has become relevant for everybody who's home with kids. And so that is why we're making this challenge publicly available. Please share it with everybody you know. Don't let anybody miss out on this. It's only three weeks but it's these crucial three weeks when we are home with our children. We don't know how long that will last but this challenge and the Present Play membership will be highly, highly transformative for that time for everybody. So I wanna really invite you to jump on with that. It's over at theparentingjunkie.com forward slash challenge.