R Shaped Recovery
Most of us are familiar with the life cycle of bell shaped curve from birth to death. It is a cruel reality of life from wearing dipper, growing teeth and hairs, to losing all of them in the end. Sadly, in society, economy, and politics, we love to talk about K shaped recovery, besides U, V, or W shaped throughout the period of observation. Have you ever heard of R shaped recovery?
Three stories
Yoko was an award winning successful entrepreneur in her entire career. Then, she moved out of her own country to join her children overseas. As a new immigrant, she picked up her passion in fashion design and restarted her career as a fashion designer in New York. During economic downturn, she got laid off. Again, she picked up her hidden talents in writing articles using some of her drawings. While growing older and older, she became a home maker and shopper for household needs. Slowly, she wondered around the street and could not find her way home. Eventually, she moved to a nursing home for dementia and died from complication of infectious diseases.
Diana is a home maker of a military officer after world war II with a son who is a professor in Academy of Science. She spends most of her life doing house works, shopping, and playing Mahjong game with her friends. She is a grateful person and loves to help others solve their problems. She continues her exercises daily and talks to people around the neighborhood after many of her relatives and friends passed away. She does have some elderly problems and got cancer at her 90s. Yet, she is still happily running around on the street at 100 years old.
Charles was a successful sales manager. Coming back from his wife’s overseas assignment, he became an independent investor. After being up and down in the stock market, he decided to retire and stay at home. Later, he becomes a news commentator. Besides his routine schedule of exercises, watching TV, and writings, he does some house and community works. He is at his 70’s with a lot of opinions about everything.
During our aging process, I discover the R shaped recovery in iterations throughout the life in the order of Reflect, Reframe, and Restart.
Reflect
People love to talk about their life stories and to share their experience and successful journeys from memory, while others may not be available nor want to be bothered. Yet, we are our own best kept audience.
For Reflection:
- We can improve the awareness of our own perceptions and feelings through Meditation or Mindfulness practices.
- By self awareness and soul searching, we can record challenges, issues and problems in our life which block us from moving forewords with a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment.
- Through discovery journey with questions of What, Why, Where, When, Who and How, we should be able to recreate the stories of our past to form a Journey Map.
Reframe
Through mentoring and coaching, we select how we want to shape and crop our current map to refocus on the areas that work best for us based on our renewed vision and big picture.
For Reframing:
- Locate the new focus on the journey map which has aligned with our big picture after reflections and lessons learned. Frame the new map for our journey to the future destination.
- Switch to a positive and growth mindset. Replace the sky from the stormy and cloudy to blue and sunshine.
- Define our GROW model (goal, reality, options and will) with SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely).
Restart
To improve performance and remove wastes and cluttering, we routinely reboot our electronic devices to clear their memory and to improve their response time for better outcome. To live a more productive life, we also need to reboot our mind and body to renew our total wellbeing.
For Restarting:
- Identify tasks for actions using agile approach and design thinking based on the new map for personal transformation.
- Create an action plan for the new journey.
- Follow through the progress and iterations to enjoy and celebrate our accomplishments along the way.
Summary
I have an old broken plaque “Love Never Fails” on my desk for decades. Whenever I look at it, I ask myself “what does it mean?”, until I moved back to New York City living in a politically divisive society with resource disparity and racial inequality in the mid of pandemics and economic breakdown. Then, I realize that LOVE is the only available currency that we can give and take freely with no exchange rate after losing faith, hope and every thing else in our life.
In short, with love and care, we reflect, reframe and restart our new life iteratively and incrementally toward eternality…
