Sticky Learning Lunch #2: How to Overcome Isolation When Cabin Fever is Starting to Take Hold

Understand the 3 stages of isolation and how to overcome them, when cabin fever is starting to take hold. Use your time working from home to become the very best version of yourself.

You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Amazing. Welcome everybody. I'm just watching the screen on the right hand side here. We've got a few more people coming in. Gonna give it another minute just to let any of those people that have signed up come in and uh, attend and take part in this. So let's make sure you've got kind of 30, 30 to 60 seconds. Let's make sure you've guys got drinks. So you've got your fluids in front of you and I haven't got mine's. Grab mine ringing out the last of that teabag.

Nathan Simmonds:

Let's also make sure what we're doing is let's get ourselves set up for success for the next 20 to 30 minutes. Making sure everyone get the phones out, get your phones on flight mode. He says we're on flight mode. Zero distractions. You've got your drinks in front of you, phones on flight mode. Any of you that don't need to be on your social media right now, if you've got LinkedIn, if you've got Facebook, if you've got WhatsApp, open on anything, let's turn those off.

Working from home comes with its cons

 

Nathan Simmonds:

Let's get maximum attention into where we are right now. I wanna share some ideas with you guys that are gonna really help, quite frankly to keep you sane in these times, especially when you are working from home. Okay, so this is gonna be super important. Zero distractions, absolute focus. Full attention on where we're going. Good. Couple more people come into the room.

Nathan Simmonds:

It's nice. So phones off, drinks in front of you. Next thing notepads. Nice clean sheet. Let's get your notepads in front of you. Pen, paper ready so you can start to take some notes. Any of the ideas that I share today, I want you to make a note of them, doodle it down, put the key words down so that when you read this again afterwards or you've got any questions later, that you can fire this up really quickly, that it sparks a new level of imagination and thinking when you're going back through that, oh yeah, I remember Nathan said that, or I remember someone asked this.

Nathan Simmonds:

Bring that back to your memory. So it's continually helping you to learn more about the content even after the event. Good. Got a good handful of people here. Let's do this. So welcome. This is Sticky Lunches. The sticky learning lunches.

Nathan Simmonds:

It's gonna be 20 minutes of content to help you be the best version of yourself in these times. Okay? Huge amounts of change going on, huge volumes of transition and transformation that are taking place right now. So this is a great time for us to really excel in ourselves. My name's Nathan Simmons and I'm senior leadership coach for the team at NBM. And I'm gonna bring you a series of 20 minute learnings, micro lessons with q and a at the end of it over the next 3, 4, 5, 6 weeks.

Nathan Simmonds:

Whatever's required for you guys to help you do that and help you accomplish and help you succeed in working from home. 'cause we're the home of sticky learning and we wanna make this stuff stick. We wanna make sticky lunches stick. So what we're covering today, the key thing that we're covering today is the eye from the mindset model.

Nathan Simmonds:

I stands for isolation Bonus points. First question to you guys in the chat question box where you wanna go? Name three stories or films that talk about isolation. Three films or three stories that talk about isolation. And the reason I'm doing this, and the reason I'm asking is 'cause these story, these stories and these ideas are gonna help you, absolutely. Gonna help you to focus on because they're teaching you stuff. So when you are watching Castaway, when you are reading Robinson Cruso, yeah, when you are looking at these films, they're showing you what's gonna happen in your psyche as you go into these experiences.

Nathan Simmonds:

So we can learn lessons from these fictional characters through their experiences is what film and media is all about. Truly isolation, cabin fever. This might have been more of a horror, horror film rather than a, a , than a true life story of how these things, I am legend. Amazing shout on that one Toy story. Two interesting point. I like it.

Nathan Simmonds:

Again, it is just the flavor of what's gonna happen for us when we look at I am legend. What happened to him psychologically from those extended periods of time, quite literally working from home surrounded by, you know, crazy mutants with only his dog for company that eventually leaves him. And he's thinking about these elements that, you know, what is it showing us right now in this variant of that theme? I'm trying to find the right word for it.

Nathan Simmonds:

You know, what we are doing right now is, is it's like being on a continuum. We're at the very far end of the continuum, the easy version of that, not surrounded by mutants depending on where we work quite possibly right now though, we're working from home, we have a choice, we have a possibility to connect with people. What we need to understand is we need to understand these three stages that commonly come up when we do work from home.

Nathan Simmonds:

And then what we're gonna do is give you five tips to help you overcome cabin fever. So what's the first thing that we see in these three stages when we're working from home? We have these, it's a new experience. It's like being on your school holidays for the first time and really knowing what that's worth. And your mum gives you a list of chores to do and you, you're on home at home and your parents have gone to work and you're like, ah, the house is mind, what can I do?

Nathan Simmonds:

And then you get, you know, yeah, action movie out. You know, you are, you, you're 15, 14, 15, and you get the action movie, got the 18 rated, uh, Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. And you're sitting there watching that and go, ah, this is the life I'm, it's gonna eat crystal day and watch Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

Nathan Simmonds:

And, and then all of a sudden it's four o'clock and you've still got this list of chores to do. And then you suddenly go into freak out, I've got all this work to do, mom's gonna be home in half an hour. The place is a mess. And you go absolutely crazy. It's the same experience. What happens is we have this sensation of freedom first and foremost, and we dunno quite what to do with it. It's all too much.

Nathan Simmonds:

It's all too overwhelming. This's this vast space of what we can do or not do. And then all of a sudden it turns into guilt. I haven't done anything. And we start kicking ourselves and giving ourselves a hard time. And we, what happens is we tend to fluctuate from one to the other. We go from freedom to guilt, to guilt, to freedom. Ah, we don't know quite what to do.

Nathan Simmonds:

And I've done this myself. Now given those first opportunities to work from home, it's like, well, I've got all this work to do. Yeah, but I've got three weeks to do it. Maybe I'll do half an hour. And then you get to three o'clock and you're like, right, sudden surge of energy and you, you do three hours work and an hour and a half you're like, why didn't I do that at nine o'clock? So you constantly kind of berating yourself and, and trying to enjoy yourself, but berate yourself at the same time. So there's constant pushed call.

Nathan Simmonds:

The second stage we have is then when we start to get into this and we start to understand it's what we call busy, busy, busy. You now know what you know about the space that you've got and how long have you guys been doing this? Let me know in the comments, how long have you guys so far been working from home in this current situation? How long have you been isolating for? Let's see how long people are out there for?

Nathan Simmonds:

Three weeks. I think we're on the cusp of our fourth week here at the Simmons household since the 18th of March. Crikey. So we're starting to get a flow of what working from home was like. So it's about 315 years. Really? Yeah. So three and a half weeks like this. Some of us have been doing it for a long time. These are new experiences. Now we're starting to find that that operating rhythm, the cadence, the flow of what we're doing, and all of a sudden we've, we've shifted out of this freedom, guilt cycle and we're now in busy, busy, busy.

Nathan Simmonds:

And we're getting to the office and we're getting up half past eight and we, we work through and all of a sudden we realize we've missed lunch and it's six 30 and we haven't helped our significant others, um, arranging dinner. Then when we go downstairs, we, we know, we get the, the the frustrated look of who, where have you been all day when we've already been in the house for so long together.

Nathan Simmonds:

So we go from one to the other. We start to overwork ourselves, we start to overcompensate. We've got all this time, I can be super productive. How much can I get done? And we try and ram as much as we can into that tiny little space. But, but then potentially, like I say, we start to overwork. We start to put stress and strain onto our family space because we are thinking we should be getting more done.

Nathan Simmonds:

We feel like maybe that guilt piece is, are we doing enough or are we being observed in our own perception for the amount of work we are or aren't doing? So we try and overcompensate by doing too much. It causes damage to our relationships and our own psyche in this space. The third part stage that we need to get to is quite simply, it's the balance. So what we do is we go from the guilt to the freedom to the busy, busy, busy.

Nathan Simmonds:

And then we go, ah, right, I don't have to answer that email right now.