When asked, what would you promise to do with an extra hour in your day?

Maybe you would promise to finish your business plan, take an online course, or accomplish any of the productive things that competed for your free time with girls’ night outs, coffee dates, concerts. Well, now “The Rona” is here, all of those calendar options are removed, so it can feel like life is calling your bluff.

Our lives have moved online and made everything multitaskable. You can lead conference calls while making chicken noodle soup from scratch, and take online classes while checking your baby’s homeschool work (let’s take a moment to pray for our girlfriends with kids, y’all). As long as you have the Internet and a fully charged device, there is no shortage of productive ways to get your grit on in the Age of Corona.

But this is not a blog post about getting through by gritting through. Be honest and acknowledge the extraordinary: things cannot be “business as usual” because we are navigating the unprecedented. In less than a month, our lives changed beyond what we once knew to be possible. We leave the house as little as possible, our co-workers have become computer screens, and while the Earth is still spinning, the world on top of it has stopped.

You have the power to navigate this new normal, but the key to unlocking that power isn’t in your productivity, but in the grace that you give yourself. Finding your place of grace is no longer just a side-activity, but the prerequisite to your most valuable asset: your peace of mind. The best investment that you can make, in this moment and all others, is in yourself.

This is a time to offer ourselves grace. A time to listen to what you need at a soul level during this crisis, to gain a deeper clarity about what is important, and to prepare yourself for success post pandemic.

Social isolation has taken a lot of items off of our agenda, but I challenge you to give that time back to yourself and spend it in your place of grace. Give yourself the permission to finish reading that book, to write that journal entry, or even to pop in on that virtual happy hour. The more grace you practice, the more power you gain.

It isn’t easy navigating the new normal. The world feels like it has shrunk to the size of our computer screens, but that’s okay.

Sometimes, your world has to go small before it can go big again. 

To find your place of grace, check out my TEDx Talk Grit and Grace.

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