The brighter side of change

Have you ever noticed just how many things we do through the same routine. You may not have, and I bet you will now (or very soon)…….

Do you….

Always put the same foot into your trousers, or put the same sock on first?
Do you wear your watch on the same wrist each day?
Do you take the same route to work or the gym each time?
Do you find yourself using the same mug or glass each day?
Do you have phrases that you’re known for?
Do you get in and out of the car the same way each time?

You may look at some of those items and think, ‘well clearly I do that the same way, there isn’t another way’. I’d challenge you that there is.

Let’s take getting in the car. A very simple thing to do, that, like me, you have probably done thousands of times the same way. I just assumed that was the way it was. Put one foot in, sit down, other foot in. I mean, come on, how else would you do it? Well, after one of my big surgeries when I had a very large wound, I found that I simply couldn’t do that. My physio in hospital had been pretty basic - how to do deep breaths, how to cough, etc. They made sure I could handle a flight of stairs before being discharged. So, faced with the car journey home I went to lift my leg to get in the car and I couldn’t. I tried a few times. Hummm. Eventually I worked out that I should sit down first. Then I could gingerly move my legs into the car. Ta da! I had to be taken out of my comfort zone to even realise that it was a routine act.

Many years ago when I was stuck in a rut and life was not how I wanted it to be, I went to see a hypnotherapist that I’d met on a course. He was very different to anyone that I’d worked with before. Two things happened that I will never forget:

He told me to become aware of all of my routines and to change them. Wear my watch on the other wrist; put the opposite leg in my trousers in the morning; take a different route to work; start swimming with the opposite arm - everything - notice and change everything. He did this to help me become more aware of how much I was in control of the sameness. How I could start with little changes and eventually make some big changes and get to the outcome that I wanted.
Not directly related to this blog, the second thing I learned was about worth. He asked me to pay what I thought I was worth. That was really tough. I could have paid what I thought he was worth (and I would usually overdo that rather than under do it). I could have paid what I thought the service was worth based on other experience. I could have paid nothing as that’s what I thought I was actually worth at the time. But if I paid nothing, then it felt like I was passing judgement on him and his service. Oh heck, whatever should I pay?! In the end, if I’m honest, I paid what I thought he & the service were worth (plus a bit) and it wasn’t lost on me that by doing so that I was actually saying that I was worth that too.

He was a clever man.

Anyway, I digress. So I set about changing all the little things. It was very weird, but also quite liberating. I was changing things, not because I had to, just because I could.

And if you can change small things, then the big things don’t seem all that big after all.

I got myself onto a better track. I achieved some of the big goals that I wanted to. I became busier and busier with the things that I filled my life with.

I slipped back into routines so that I could get through all the little stuff to save time to focus on the big stuff.

Every now and then something happens that forces you to step back out of the comfort zone again in order to move on.

Along comes Covid-19

There’s not been a change as big as this one that has impacted so many people in my lifetime. Within in days so many of my routines were disrupted and more would come. What changed for you?

Suddenly working from home, and despite this being something that I wanted to do, it wasn’t straight forward to adapt to early on.
No swimming 😢
No gym
No chiropractor visits
No visitors
No in person clients
No frequent visits to the Little Waitrose up the road

I have created some new routines too. I now like to cycle on my e-bike. We cook from scratch.

Then came May. The first weekend in May is historically the first training session for Dover Channel Training (DCT), which I lead. It was clear that things would need to be different this year. Before lockdown hit, I had already started conversations about what adaptations would be required. For example, we wouldn’t be able to hug on the beach (a frequent occurrence); we wouldn’t be able to help each other out with suncream or grease. And so the thinking went on. How could we tweak what we do to be Covid compliant.

When the government set out its plan for a gradual release from lockdown, I read the long report and interpreted what it meant for channel training. I concluded that the earliest we’d be able to restart was Step 3. Some interpreted it to be sooner by using the meeting 6 people rule, but I concluded that step 3 was the right time for DCT.

Once we knew when, we needed to work out how. The swimming zone in the harbour is actually pretty big, that’s not where the risk lay in this context. The risk was on the beach with social distancing in an uncontrolled environment. So I sought to reduce that risk, firstly by seeing if we could reduce the risk of other people on the beach by having a protected area and then by limiting the number of people who train so that we can ensure we comply with social distancing.

Images of busy beaches just continued to highlight the risks.

How could I keep a large group safe on a beach when people seem to be flocking to all the beaches in the area?

I had fallen into the trap of trying to protect the routine. In this case the routine was a large group of people congregating in Dover to train for channel swims and other similar challenges.

That’s when the magic happened.

I arranged a zoom call with some trusted friends from all sorts of professions. Between us we flipped it all on its head. I had been looking at the challenge through the eyes of someone trying to protect the normal routine. When you let go of that you get to the real question.

‘How can we support swimmers who are training for their big event, especially during Covid-19’.

There is a very important and subtle difference. There is no mention of Dover in that question. Bring a large group together anywhere is not the right thing to do right now, especially not at weekends on a beach.

We recognised that Dover is important to many of us for all sorts of reasons, but it would not be the centre of all that we do this year. By using zoom we could provide one to one support and keep a group feel through community calls. We could provide a blend of options that the swimmer could choose from. Some require a little bit of support, some a lot. We would bring the essence of what DCT meant to the location of the swimmer.

Brilliant. Why hadn’t we done that before? There are swimmers in areas where Dover is not accessible that could have benefited from this before. Why didn’t we - simply because nothing forced us to stop and ask if we needed to approach things completely differently. Yes we had made changes, a lot of small changes, but the fundamentals of it being about coming to Dover to train were exactly the same.

I hope that some of these changes will stay even if / when we no longer have Covid-19 restrictions. I am also looking forward to when we can hug swimmers to congratulate them again.

So over to you. Have you got areas of your life that you need to change? Are there areas of your life that would benefit from asking a different question.

If you would like some coaching to work through this, please do get in touch.