Who are you becoming? I ask myself every day now that we’ve been in this pandemic for about 10 months. I don’t think a lot of us are asking ourselves this question. It’s a prime time to begin to ask ourselves this question.
- Who am I?
- What am I going to be now?
- And what am I going to be, as I come out of this pandemic?
I don’t think I’ve ever had as much time to be quiet. I don’t think any of us are good with quiet. We have spent so much time in our lives in cars, and in subways and trains and buses, going from place to place and getting things done and finding parking, and planning.
But it’s for the first time, I think since forever, we have the time to be quiet. It’s quieter out there. There are not as many cars on the road; there’re very few kids at school. I think now is the best time to reflect. I also think it’s the scariest time to reflect because nobody knows what’s going, what’s going to be.
But there’s this gnawing inside of me about what could you learn about yourself right now? I hope you’re feeling that too. Right now we have some downtime, and it just occurs to me that we really should be reflecting on the type of person that we want to be coming out of this pandemic. And it looks like we are going to come out of this pandemic, and it is time to ask yourself, “who are you becoming?”
Because when we go back, it’s gonna be like a rubber band. We’re going back and we’re going to do exactly what we did before unless we stop. Right now, and especially with the holidays coming, things will slow down even more. Now is the perfect time to ask, “who are you becoming?”
Are you using this pandemic to figure out what you can really bring to your family, to your job, to the world? It’s a scary question because you’re asking yourself, and I’m asking myself, to give something greater than I’ve already given. It’s not more, this is not a “more” conversation. This is a who conversation. This is about who am I becoming? Who do I want to be?
Why We Should Be Asking This
Because when we go back, it’s gonna be like a rubber band. We’re going back and we’re going to do exactly what you did before unless we stop. Right now, and especially with the holidays coming, things will slow down, even more, to ask yourself, who are you becoming?
How are you using this pandemic, to figure out what you can really bring to your family to your job to the world? It’s a scary question, because you’re asking yourself, and I’m asking myself, to give something greater than I’ve already given. It’s not more, this is not a conversation. This is a who conversation. This is who am I becoming? Who do I want to be?
My Reflections
I find that it’s been almost ten months, and I’ve pushed myself to, to be more expressive, to do more writing, to write more articles, to come up with great ideas for my clients. But there’s still a message inside of me that I need to share. You know, maybe this message is me now sharing, who am I becoming?
If you asked me right now, and I have to answer the question, I’m becoming more self expressive, and I’m becoming more creative. I’m becoming a person who’s more appreciative about the creativity that I bring.
So if all we got out of this, this pandemic was that you’re becoming somebody who:
- Appreciates yourself more,
- Someone who really relishes in what they bring, and starts to, to be more creative and brings it
- Someone who wants to share their voice to be more expressive in what they do with their family, work, life and community.
This is the time to realize that.
To Reflect on 2020, and Look into 2021
It’s scary. Because we are quiet and we’re not used to being quiet. It’s scary to write. It’s scary to think about becoming something different. It’s scary to be more creative. But I think what’s scarier is to actually think about that rubber band snapping back. As soon as everything goes back to normal, you just become your normal self. That’s the biggest risk. I think that’s the saddest thing.
So I think in answering the question Who, who you are becoming, I think the place to go would be to ask yourself, what are those attributes of yourself that you’ve really wanted to step into greater?
Maybe you’re becoming someone who takes more risks. For a lot of us who’ve had to take risks that we might not have taken but for the pandemic, maybe we need to take care of that right now and say, “Who I’m becoming is a riskier person. Who I’m becoming is a more creative person. Who I’m becoming is a more empathetic person.”
This is a Wake-Up Call
I think this is a wake up call for all of us in being more empathetic for caring about people we don’t even know and the people we do know.
Don’t waste the crisis, don’t waste the pandemic, it sounds so trite, but it’s so true. So I would really urge you to think about what traits, what values, what are the things that you really care about, that you’ve been afraid to say that you care about?
Don’t waste this time. Who do you want to be when you come out of this crisis? How do you want to show up? Just asking the question of “who do you want to become?” and giving yourself some time to really sit in that question is the beginning of becoming who you want to become.
So yeah, I’d love to hear from you about what you are thinking, because I know you’ve been thinking about it. And I challenge you, have you been writing it down or communicating with somebody?
For me, I want to be more empathetic, I want to be more creative, I want to be more expressive, I want to be more confident, I want to be more playful. All those things I want to become and, it’s time now to start working on it, because it’s gonna get busy in 2021 and we’re gonna forget this moment. But if we spend time at this moment, really nailing down who we’re becoming, we’ll remember this moment as the time we made the greatest shift in our lives; we became who we were truly meant to be.
