Some of you may be experiencing an underlying or omnipresent sense of uneasiness. To steal from the Harvard Business Review, “that discomfort you’re feeling is grief.” Some of you may be experiencing grief from a recent loss on top of the collective grief we feel as a society. This post includes a series of resources to help everyone manage grief, whether it is felt as a result of the collective loss of the world we knew or due to the loss of a person, pet, or important opportunity in your life.

Regardless of what we think and how strong the pull is to throw in the towel or sleep on the couch, we do have the capacity to continue to move forward. Our ability to battle on; however, may be thwarted by crisis fatigue. Crisis fatigue can occur when a stressful incident becomes enduring or chronic. Your body has adapted to handle acute or short-term stresses but given the chaos of 2020, you may be feeling overwhelmed by the seemingly unrelenting nature of the last nine plus months.

As we continue to “onboard” into this new year, you may find it helpful to consider your life load, the elements that contribute to it and how that load impacts you – at work, in your personal life and your engagement in self-care. All of us carry a daily “life load,” and that load is composed of physical elements, emotional elements and, right now, the stress of living through a pandemic. Sometimes our load is high, and that is ok; we can handle high loads – if they do not last forever! The key is to gain an awareness of your load, what makes it high, and what makes it low.

Did you know that you can enhance your happiness by caring about the happiness of others? Seems odd, but it is true. We can also enhance our happiness through gratitude - simply by nothing five things we are grateful for once a week - that’s a pretty easy practice, with a significant ROI!

Much of our communication occurs without detailed thought or specific intention. Unbeknownst to us, we are always engaged in a feedback loop with others: our partners, our co-workers, and our friends. Of this, author Molly Godfrey notes, “We can either make people feel brilliant or like total idiots in our presence, it comes down to one thing and one thing only: Our reception.” That is, how we receive those around us and the way we greet and recognize others particularly when we are offered their vulnerability. All of us, at times, will likely display poor “reception’ skills. Fortunately, with awareness and intentional actions we can become better at engaging in our ongoing feedback loops.