How a pandemic existential spiral helped my business
Purpose. Pleasure. Play.
It’s beautiful and scary, as a business owner, to have the power to proactively seek all those things out in your life. Beautiful because you have the power to do so. Scary because you can’t sidestep the responsibility to do so.
If you didn’t already know, I co-host a podcast called The One That Works For You. On it, we talk to business owners in the messy middle about how they try to find that oh-so-elusive trifecta: fulfilment, balance, and success.
On episode #11 of the podcast, we spoke to Lindsay Hyatt, a freelance coach who helps women explore life outside of a 9-5. After surviving lockdown with a newborn and a toddler, Lindsay learned an important lesson: self care and wellness are essential to creating a sustainable business.
She talks about her daily quest for pleasure and softness (and how she works it around getting shit done), and the course of the conversation brought us around to a framework I came up with for purpose during the first lockdown, when my existential crisis had the spiralled into a sense of doom.
The framework has 4 categories, which I’ve discovered Lindsay now calls the four pillars of life.
Purpose for when you have none
How to cope with being at home with your partner 24/7.
How to work from home.
How to work out from home.
How to be more productive.
How to be less productive.
How to accept being more/less productive.
Lockdown was a time for everybody, especially people who have never freelanced and never had to impose a structure into their own day. I was lying on my bed in a towel, wrestling with (and losing to) the crushing ennui of all the empty hours I was facing. Here’s what I was thinking.
In the face of a pandemic, it becomes evident almost everything we do is optional. So why do anything?
Well, why DO we do anything?
The first reason that came to mind was ‘because we like it’. Because it’s pleasurable. But why else?
The Four Categories of Purpose
As I lay in my towel considering our motivations for doing things when nothing is important and everything is optional, I came up with 4 essential categories.
Pleasure
Achievement
Connection
Helpfulness
Note: most actions can fall into multiple categories and there’s no real objective way to sort things — it all depends on what that action means to you. Calling a family member, for example, could fall under pleasure if you enjoy talking to them, connection if it provides that sense of connection, achievement if you’re working on improving that relationship, or helpfulness if you calling that person makes things easier for someone else!
Pleasure
This one’s easy. Do something that you find pleasurable- but be mindful about it. In a time when your options might be more limited than usual, taking the time to make something significant can make a big difference to your mindset.
Hopefully, you do more than one enjoyable thing in a day, but pause before one of them and tell yourself ‘this is my pleasurable thing for today’. Here are some ideas:
Talk to your loved ones on the phone
Draw/paint/write/do something creative
Do a physical activity
Eath something delicious
Rearrange your living room
Achievement
I have several friends who’ve had to leave their skilled jobs because of COVID-19 and are struggling with feeling ‘useless’. A sense of achievement plays a huge role in combatting the helplessness many of us are feeling, whether we’re still employed or not.
If you’re working from home, your work could be your ‘achievement’. If you’re not working or if work doesn’t satisfy this need, here are some other things you could achieve:
Clean out a section of your house
Work through a free online course
Learn a new physical skill
Beat a video game or finish a book
Work on a hobby or project, or simply ‘get better’ at one of your current hobbies
Connection
Call someone you love on the phone
Play a virtual game with a friend
Join a Netflix watch party
The activities I’ve listed above can either be powerful tools for connection, or not. It all depends on how you approach them. Make a point to go deep on your ‘connection’ phone call. Be open and vulnerable and hold space for the other person to do the same. It can be scary, and it’s hard work, but you have to find a way to recreate the warmth you get from a hug — through the phone.
Remember, you only have to do this for one a day. You can gossip about your tv shows on all your other phone calls.
Helpfulness
No matter how deep and dark and helpless and God-awful our own lives get, doing something helpful to someone else is a quick way to lift our spirits. Helping someone else is often easier than helping ourselves, so why not use that as a method to boost your own mood and sense of purpose. I’ve tried to lost a few lockdown- specific examples and more general ones for you.
Help someone with some paperwork. Government assistance, tax, applications, set up their new Internet or find them a better phone plan
Practice active listening for someone in need
Give someone something they need or donate to charity
Buy something from or help promote a small/local business
Take on some extra chores around the house
Help someone study or teach/share your knowledge
(Want to read more about this idea of helpfulness/usefulness? Check out this article.)
If you’re stuck at home (or mostly at home) and you find yourself drowning in too much time and not enough ‘stuff’ to do, doing one thing that fits into each of these categories will provide you with a structure that’s defined yet gentle enough on your mental health.
I recommend writing down a list of activities that fall into each category so it’s easy to just glance at your lists and pick one to do that day.
