A year ago, virtually every aspect of our lives changed profoundly: How we eat, shop, work, socialize, exercise, etc. These weren’t changes we chose but changes that were forced on us.  Now that we are beginning to imagine life returning to something more similar to pre-pandemic, we have some decisions to make. Are there new habits that we’ve adopted that we might want to keep? Old habits that we don’t want to return to.

What’s clear is that we DON’T want to do is miss this opportunity to make a conscious choice.

Takeaways: 

• For better or worse, the pandemic forced us to reassess/reinvent virtually every aspect of our lives.
• There may be things that we adopted over the last year that actually worked better for us.
• It’s worth pausing before we rush back into our pre-pandemic patterns to consider how we might want to return.
• No matter what we choose, we are likely to be happier and more fulfilled if we make those choices consciously.

Lab Experiment: 

1. Select an area of your life that you were forced to reinvent during the pandemic and will now have an opportunity to either revert to the previous stays quo or not.
2. Make a list of all of the ways that the change benefited you all the ways in which the change did not benefit you.
3. Think about those pros and cons in the context of your values. (Is convenience more important to you than consistency for example? Is quality more important than quantity? Is supporting local business more important than getting the cheapest price?)
4. Decide what you’d like to do once your options are open. Will you go back to your original status quo, stay with your current status quo, or design a third option that works best of all?