Terry S. de Guzman is an accomplished C-suite executive and life coach offering a holistic and sustainable approach to help you meet your life and business challenges and opportunities.
Today is the first day of a new year, 2022.
I get it: at midnight, 2021 came to a close. But, what I’m not sure I get is what it means for a year to be new? How do I make sense of a year that seems to simply be time lost?
Postponed from 2020 to 2021 due to COVID-19, the Japanese people wowed us with the spectacular opening ceremonies, though we had doubts about how these Olympic games would pan out.
There were no fans in the stands, strict COVID-19 protocols were in place, and those of us at home shared a well-founded sense of worry as the threat of the virus and the new variants loomed over all the athletes, support staff, news media, and of course, the Japanese people.
Still, we expected nothing less than new world records, historic medal counts, incredible endurance, power and strength, grit at its best. As the games proceeded and we cheered on from the comforts of our homes, what we did not expect was ….
My husband and I just returned from an epic road trip across America that took us 39 days, logging 9,914 miles, covering 17 states, 8 national parks and 24 cities…
I’ve been wrestling over how to respond to my grown children’s query: “Mom, how do you feel about the rising Asian-American hatred in America?” We have all seen the videos of the attacks on elderly Asians, and our children worry that as my husband and I consider traveling again, we may become easy targets. They remind us to be careful, they fear for our safety. They suggest, maybe we should postpone any travel plans.
On one hand, I understand that sadly, racism is nothing new to America; on the other hand, this new wave of racist violence directed at people who look like me, who remind me of my mother, my father, my grandparents, aunts and uncles, is hitting home in a deep, visceral way…
When, without so much as a whisper of warning, the pandemic enveloped the entire world sometime in March 2020, we figured out how to “make do”. In the process, we learned what we want more of, and certainly, what we could do without. In many ways, we’ve been forced to “learn forward”: to meet the new and unexpected circumstances on its own terms. We had no choice but to let go of what was not relevant anymore, exploring new ways of living and doing things and creating new rules as we go. We even developed new “pandemic habits”, the likes of which we had not imagined ourselves ever doing.
I’d like to suggest that is it a good time to reflect on our learning forward moments in the last nine months, and to consider how we can continue to let life show itself.
Thanksgiving is once more upon the USA. Given what 2020 has brought: the pandemic, heightened racial injustice, a divisive presidential election, a teetering economy, it feels hard to be grateful. I have been dilly-dallying writing this blog, because I wanted to write about “re-energize”, but I couldn’t find the energy to write. Some dilemma.
Ready to let my self-imposed deadline slip, I was lazily sipping coffee this morning when I saw this adorable little face on TV…
Not unlike how social media redefined the meaning of friend, the pandemic has redefined for us the meaning of living, working and learning. This change in meaning is not happening only to us individually, but, consciously or unconsciously, we are also making each other – our spouses, life partners, children, extended family, work colleagues, friends, the community – redefine what it means to live, work and learn.
In many ways, September 1st felt like the beginning of a new year. To most of us, it marked the start of the new school year, when children and young adults start going back to school.
It feels quite different this year. As September, 2020 dawns upon us, millions of people all over the world are facing job loss, food insecurity, health concerns, and the unprecedented dilemma of how to stay healthy while giving our children the best shot at an enriching education and protecting their future.
We’ve had a lot of time on our hands. Since the world shut down in mid-March, we’ve spent most of our waking hours wondering what life will be when all of “this” – the global pandemic, reckoning with race, the economic meltdown – is over. The world has been turned upside down, and what worked before just doesn’t work anymore. if I were to reinvent myself, how do I move forward?
So much is in flux, brought about by COVID-19 and George Floyd’s murder. Caveat: I am not naively suggesting that if we all woke up tomorrow feeling self-motivated, the world will suddenly become better and everyone will embrace each other as an equal. I’m simply suggesting that for those of us who are actively wondering if there is anything – anything at all we can do, my answer is yes, and the “what” is within us.
Without a clear path to a cure to COVID-19, the only prevention our brilliant scientists and medical professionals have identified thus far is what we have been living with since March, and what is evolving into what could be our new normal: “social distancing”, lock-down”, “community quarantine”, “self-isolation”. Self-isolation has now become synonymous to self-preservation.
While we are still in this state of some form of isolation, experts propose several coping strategies – ways we can more actively and intentionally manage our altered state…
The dictionary definition of Self-Care is “the practice of taking an active role in protecting one’s own well-being and happiness, in particular during periods of stress”. Sounds good. And yet, as we all know, the very thing that gets to the bottom of our list when we get stressed is taking care of ourselves. Here’s the thing: “The problem is that we end up substituting the important with the urgent way more than we should.” Sounds familiar?
