The handbook for running a business during COVID-19 doesn't exist
I hope, my brave marketers, you are all staying well, healthy, and HOME.
I’ve started to keep track of my responses on FB posts. I try to respond to as many threads as I can where I feel my advice can be helpful to the poster.
I now save my responses and turn them into blog posts that can reach more ears outside of the forums I belong to. This blog post is actually a few responses put together as several people have expressed the same thing amidst new fear and concern with COVID-19.
Q: The poster is feeling completely uninspired while isolated at home during this pandemic, and wonders if her spark is gone. Also unhelpful that she sees others documenting their lives or making the best and feels unproductive given all the free time she currently has.
There is no handbook for how to act or react to a global pandemic that has essentially shut the world down. In our over-productive and judgemental culture we can feel guilt for even enjoying a cup of coffee in the morning while doing nothing else. Now that the pressures of the world have largely been taken off, we continue to internalize that toxic mindset and become our own guilt-keepers, which can be destructive to our mental health.
It’s ALL ok.
Staring at 4 walls is ok. Crying is ok. Running 10k a day is ok. Channeling your inner Julia Childs and making meals from scratch ok. Eating frozen food zapped in the microwave is ok. Staying in bed all day is ok. Technology to help with wall-climbing kids is ok. Taking pictures ok. Not taking pictures ok. Of course if we need to work we do so, and if we need to care for children or others, we do so. But our downtime can be anything we want and it doesn’t have to keep up with anyone else, look better or fancier or more productive/ creative/ comedic/ dramatic or anything else on social media. This is truly a time where no one is looking - because we’re literally isolated physically from others.
When schools first closed on a Friday, my 12- year old daughter was taken aback (she loves school) but took it in stride. Come Monday, she wanted a curriculum to follow, insisted on playing “restaurant” for lunch, and rollerbladed in the house (weather was snowy and cold). After the first few days, the enthusiasm waned, as the impacts started to sink in. Her dance competition scheduled for the end of March was cancelled. She heard rumours of longer school closures from her friends and started to worry about her grade 6 prom, for which we had already bought a dress she fell in love with. No school meant no talent show and she and a friend had worked an entire weekend to create a hip hop routine that would now have no audience.
So after a few days of frenetic activity, she crashed. She felt like doing nothing except binge-watching Netflix. No chats with friends, no playing with mom or dad. Lunch “restaurant” was closed for business and all she wanted to eat was thawed mango chunks. She cried that day that she did nothing, was unproductive. She felt useless, listless and like she should have been doing something. There was nowhere for her emotions to go except to self-criticism. So this is what I told her.
Listen to your gut.
Without outside schedules and pressures the noise has been cut away and the only thing we have to listen to is our gut. And it’s our gut that has the most authentic message because our brains are biased from our cultural and societal expectations. Whatever your gut tells you is the right thing, is usually the right thing. When we feel gut feelings they are often the ones we dismiss for the more rational musings of our brain but could very well be the more authentic feelings; our brains are often hijacked in favour of keeping up with the masses and looking good and successful doing it. So if she felt lethargic then maybe the real message was that she needed rest. Rest is not unproductive, useless or listless. It’s recovery, peace, introspection.
I don't know if there is a larger lesson by our maker/the universes here, but certainly this pandemic is a time-out on a massive scale, and us busy bees don't know what to do with ourselves with all of this downtime. If we have time, we usually fill it and have trouble slowing down. We feel everything has to be done and nothing could ever get cut, and if we run out of steam before we get to the end of our list, we feel guilt and failure. We’ve stopped being governed by our internal compass and have outsourced our lives to the almighty clock and all the activities geared by that clock: work, school, playdates, soccer practices, worship schedules, dinner meetups, and other appointments and activities all stacked up on top of one another.
Now that we’ve been mandated into physical distancing and isolation at home with immediate family, returning to our more primal selves and reflecting inwards is the only thing we can do. And that’s if we can tolerate being silent enough to listen to the voice we usually ignore because we have to be somewhere at 9am and then this appointment and that, all day long.
I like the lessons of Zen Habits, a blog that talks about simplicity, peacefulness, and a slower pace. I’ve loosely followed the blog for years because I wanted to try and slow my pace down even before the COVID-19 crisis, and it’s a good place to be on the Internet right now. We can all learn to breathe more, in the midst of terrible times.
The key is to just not make any drastic decisions in a time of such upheaval and uncertainty- simply be guided by that internal voice for self care. You won’t go wrong. Comment on how you’re handling things right now and remember - there is no right or wrong answer. Whatever it is that you’re doing to manage, it’s ok.
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