The 19 Potential GIFTS of the Pandemic & the Top 29 Tips to Help You Get Through It
If you have been through enough hardship in your life up to now then you know that hardship and problems offer you potential gifts depending on how you deal with the hardship or problems. I can just imagine some of you rolling your eyes, scoffing, or otherwise reacting in disbelief. Yet, as someone who has weathered a ton of hardship in life, I can assure you that this pandemic offers you 19 potential gifts. While you are welcome to skip to that list, I hope that you will consider reading what I am providing in between here and there – because some of that is absolutely for YOU! Nobody likes this pandemic. Nobody likes dealing with hardship. It’s not fun.
You might be feeling helpless and out of control. You might be filled with worry, fear, panic, anger, resentment, depression and anxiety. I completely understand and quite frankly that is reasonable given the circumstances. Most people simply were not prepared for what has happened. What I know from dealing with tremendous hardship, which I would say more about if it was not dangerous for me to do so, is that hardship has the potential to either break us and make us bitter or it has the potential to help us be more resilient, more focused and energized, and better people all around. At least that is my take on hardship with all the experience I have with it. My desire is to help you get through this and come out the other side with a better life. I believe with all of my heart that is possible for you – if you are willing to entertain that possibility.
If you are new to my blog, I picked the title, Love.Life.™, because I am a fan of LOVE and all things related to LOVE. I am also a firm believer that if you are going to LOVE LIFE then that means being able to LOVE and appreciate all aspects of life including hardship, troubles and problems. I don’t mean that I love it when I have a problem or a hardship. But I have the skills and abilities to deal with the troubles, problems and hardships that life brings to me. I chose my title because to be powerful and effective in LIFE – you have to be able to deal with all of it. The content of my blog posts are all about the habits, practices, skills and attitudes necessary to have a LIFE that you LOVE – even during horrible times. This pandemic brings a whole host of new issues and problems to the forefront of life. We are in a position that we have never had to deal with before on this level. It is an opportunity for us to bring LOVE to the center of LIFE and grow and develop.
How you deal with hardship or big problems depends on a variety of things including the coping mechanisms or strategies that you use in daily living, how you deal with your emotions, your emotional quotient or emotional intelligence, your beliefs and attitudes in and about life, your religious beliefs, and the choices that you make. If you didn’t have great coping mechanisms or strategies in life prior to the pandemic, then it is extremely likely that you might be hard hit by the pandemic. Not to worry – it’s never too late to start to develop strong and healthy coping mechanisms or strategies for life. Hint: Most of my blog posts deal with either directly or indirectly having strong coping mechanisms and strategies so there is over 150 pages of free help on that.
How are you dealing with your emotions? How high is your emotional intelligence (EI) or emotional quotient (EQ)? The higher your emotional intelligence or quotient was prior to the pandemic, the easier this will be for you. Don’t worry if you don’t know what emotional intelligence or emotional quotient is – you can learn via this blog post devoted to EI/EQ and find out the benefits of high emotional intelligence and why it’s important. If I can be frank, we are not living in a society or a world where people are really great in dealing with their emotions. We mostly are not trained in how to manage, process and deal with our emotions. The better you are at this – the easier life will be for you now during the pandemic and afterward. Learn more about dealing with this topic.
Let’s talk about the choices you can make as a result of the pandemic. This is my view on choices:
Love,
Lisa
- You get to choose how this will impact you.
- You get to choose how you will use this to benefit you.
- You get to choose how you will use your unexpected gift of time assuming you are in the category of not working during this time.
- You get to choose how you will deal with or not deal with your emotions.
- You get to choose if you will practice learning how to manage, process and deal with your emotions.
- You get to choose how you will move forward from this.
The 19 Potential Gifts of the Pandemic
- It can help you appreciate the fragility of life.
- It can help you appreciate the little things in life like a warm smile from a stranger, like having food and toilet paper, like nice weather, like help given or help received.
- It can help you gain the gift of humility.
- It can help you re-evaluate what your life is for and what you want out of life.
- It can help you get clear about what is important to you and what is not – the gift of clarity and introspection.
- It can help you become a better person – more compassionate, more loving, more kind, less righteous, less judgmental, less arrogant, and so on.
- It can help you gain a sense of humanity – we are all in this together.
- It can help you re-evaluate the people and relationships you have in your life.
- It can help you make changes in your life in the areas of health and wellness, emotional quotient, relationships, how you use your time and so on.
- It provides you with the gift of learning new skills, habits and practices.
- It provides you with the potential to have more LOVE in your life – more love, joy, happiness – can become a priority instead of an evasive illusion that might happen one day.
- It can help you make new friends – either who help you or whom you help.
- It can help you to value your time and how you use it – the more you value your life and life in general – then valuing time is a natural progression or evolution.
- It can help you take charge of your life in a new way, perhaps for the first time ever, which can be both exciting and scary.
- It can help you learn to “Flip the Switch” and manage and control your emotions. See my post titled Disaster Relief: How to “Flip the Switch” on Your Emotions and Feel Better Now! From March 22, 2020.
- It can help you learn how to generate your own happiness instead of letting the circumstances dictate how you feel and how happy you are. This is so important and I have a blog post on this titled How to Generate Your Own Happiness & Why It’s the Skill to Learn, February 13, 2020.
- It could help you get connected or reconnected with God.
- It could help you grow and develop in so many rich and compelling ways – it’s growth and development. This is such a deep and amazing topic that I am a strong fan of, which you can read more about in my post titled Top 45 Ways that Personal Growth & Development Will Help You Have a Life You Love, November 29, 2019.
- It could help you deal with your feelings of depression, overwhelm, anxiety, fear and low self-esteem once and for all. I have blogged about these emotions in several posts, which I highly recommend: Dealing with Overwhelm: How to Put an End to Feeling Overwhelmed with Life Once and For All Plus 29 Tips to help you in the Meantime, November 6, 2019; Dealing with Depression – 43 Tips to Help You Stave Off Depression, January 20, 2020; Worry & Fear Hurt Your Health: 15 Tips to Overpower Fear & Worry & Start Taking Risks, March 4, 2020; Is Low Self-Esteem Stealing Love, Joy & Happiness from Your Life? Top 29 Tips for Boosting Self-Esteem Like a Boss, March 6, 2020.
Tips to Help You Get Through the Coronavirus
- Be all about integrity. Be your word. Keep your promises. It will help you feel better.
- No gossiping. There is no integrity in gossip.
- Laugh as often as possible. Watch comedies. Tell jokes. Make funny videos to share.
- Give LOVE.
- Remember YOU ARE ENOUGH.
- Work on healing yourself – through growth and development. After all, most of you have time right now.
- Give generously to others if you can.
- Don’t take yourself too seriously.
- Pray or meditate because that will help you regardless of what is happening.
- Take care of your body.
- Take care of your mind and spirit.
- Socialize by calling people, getting on Zoom or some other platform or other communications tool.
- FORGIVE – Forgiveness is for you not the other person. Forgiveness does not mean forget.
- Distance yourself from negativity.
- Don’t watch the news! Turn off the news because it is NOT helping you. If anything major happens, someone will call you or you will find out about it on social media.
- Let life FLOW – don’t force things.
- Don’t give away your power -ever.
- Figure out what you can do to make the world a better place – and start making plans to do that.
- Clean up or organize your living space, or anything.
- Be authentic and vulnerable. More about that in a post titled The Power & Magic of Vulnerability: Top 10 Ways You Can Start Increasing Your Ability to be Vulnerable, March 10, 2020.
- Be PRESENT. Live in the now.
- Do anything that is creative – art, hobbies, etc.
- Keep a journal. If you have never done that – it’s a great time to start.
- Boost your coping skills and mechanisms. Why not?
- Set up a reward system to get yourself motivated! I am a fan of this and do it all the time. I have this covered in a post titled Self-Motivation: The Nuts & Bolts of Leveling Up with a Reward System, February 18, 2020. It’s effective and quite fun!
- Listen to music that you love.
- Go for a walk, which is allowed with social distancing. You can even walk around your living space and get lots of steps. Trust me I have done that in bad weather when outdoor walking didn’t work.
- Set up events for the future to give yourself something to look forward to – reunions, potluck dinners, parties, road trips – this can really elevate your mood!
- Spend time working on your hobbies! If you don’t have any hobbies – now is the perfect time to start one. I am an absolute believer in hobbies. You can read more about this in my post titled How Hobbies Can Help You Love Your Life and the Top 23 Reasons You Should Hobby Up, December 11, 2019.
Concluding Thoughts
With a few rare exceptions, most hardship or difficulties in life offer you potential gifts if you are open to them. How you react to hardship or difficulties can make you a better person and your life much richer and more powerful. That might not be how you are used to handling or dealing with hardship. I promise you as a trauma expert and someone who learned a long time ago how to have strong coping skills, habits and practices – you can not only get through this pandemic, but you can flourish. That might not seem possible to you now. I am asking you to trust me and have some faith. You have choices that you might not recognize when hard times arrive on your doorstep. You make choices whether you are aware of that fact or not. I should say that if you are seriously depressed or considering suicide, please call 911, or your local or the national suicide hotline. Please tell someone. Your life matters. Also, I am not a therapist in any way nor a medical professional, therefore this is not medical advice but simply suggestions from a trauma expert who has a degree in the school of hard knocks. How can I help you get through this pandemic with a more powerful and happy life? What do you need? The whole point of my blog is to help my beloved readers to live a LIFE that they LOVE. It is about developing the skills, habits, practices, attitudes and beliefs that provide you with a powerful life full of love. I know how hard life can be as someone who is starting over in life at age 58 with pretty much nothing – unrelated to the pandemic. Trust me I know how painful this is for you right now. It breaks my heart that you and the world is experiencing this right now. I wish it was not so. But it is our new reality and how you deal with it will impact your life moving forward. Please let me know how I can support you during this time of hardship.Love,
Lisa
1 thought on “The 19 Potential Gifts of the Pandemic & the Top 29 Tips to Help You Get Through It”
very helpful, thank you