Patience is not a personal quality that I come by naturally. There is nothing more difficult for me than having a week at work where there is nothing happening, nothing imminent, nothing needed, nothing, nothing, nothing. For most people, this gives them an opportunity to step back and enjoy some well-deserved work/life balance. For me, it is a recipe to start overthinking, overanalyzing, and spinning in self-created circles.
Throughout the pandemic, I was forced to learn and practice patience. Corporate Real Estate activity globally ground to a halt as companies encountered confused markets, uncertain futures, and shifting in-office work profiles. A mantra that I forced myself to repeat daily was ‘do not create unnecessary work’. I would repeat this to myself over and over because the temptation was there to find things for myself to work on that could fill the empty time.
As we came out of the pandemic, I grew excited by the opportunity to finally get back to a normal schedule. Surely, now, things would get back to how they were as the decisions we kicked down the road came back around needing solutions. Imagine my surprise when we hit the ground running smoothly because we had set ourselves up to get right into it with none of the messy noise that could have bogged us down. It gave me the gift of further quiet days. This time around, it hit harder because I had assumed that the quiet would be over and had geared myself up to hit the ground hard.
Instead, I sit hear repeating my mantra: Do not create unnecessary work. Do not create unnecessary work. Do not create unnecessary work. As I repeat this to myself, I cannot help but laugh at how I brought this on myself by thinking that everything would get back to normal fast. If we have learned anything over the past couple of years, it is that normal is not necessarily what we thought it was.