Good afternoon everybody. I want to talk about the fact that we are going into lockdown two.
What I want to talk about is what the hell are you going to do now. There is talk about furlough being stretched out to March, so there’s a lot of people potentially at home. Lockdown for a month.
As soon as they said a month my first reaction was, which month are they going to stop it?
My focus here right now is to ask you some serious questions about what the hell are you going to do next?
This is a serious space.
Mental health is being seriously challenged for many people without a doubt, there are increases in people who are feeling depressed, down and that was during the last lockdown.
Which by the way, when there are longer days, more sunshine generally people’s demeanour is lifted and they feel more optimistic. Statistically you get to winter months people get more depressed, some of the highest depression rate levels in the world are where there are short days.
But essentially you wake up, it could be dark, going to bed it could be dark likely. There are five things that I really want you to consider at this moment in time.
The first thing is, I chose to do this, many, many years ago for some reason people in my mum’s generation don’t seem to do this. They don’t seem to know how to do it and it’s not being disrespectful, but some people in my family, the older generation, believe the news is gospel.
We’ve got a whole bunch of information about Covid and you can choose to believe them or not, how accurate the tests are. The point I want to make is if you want to get focused, you’re going to have to tune noise out or tune it down or bring the volume down on the noise that is going on.
Choose what you want to listen to over these coming months. What crap do you want to tune out and what good stuff do you want to tune in because it is a choice and ultimately the only person that can make the choice is you and that means being more effective with your time.
Being effective with what you listen to and what you choose not to listen to, that’s the first thing. I’m talking about the news, social media.
Number two what is your outcome?
You’ve got a month, two months going through Christmas into the New Year. What do you want to achieve in the last two months of 2020? Is it going to be I want to chill every night and watch Netflix or whatever it is you watch prime or, I want to study something new? I want to learn something, enhance myself, grow or expand, get fitter, learn a musical instrument. Do you want to learn how to trade, invest in property, write a book? Do you want to spend more time with your kids and learn how to be a great teacher to your children?
Do you want to learn calligraphy or learn a language, but something will grow, expand, but use this opportunity so that in years to come you can say in lockdown two that’s when I did this. That’s when I learnt that. That’s when I created this product.
But it has to be a passion project that you want, that you’re committed to, as on a long cold, wet, shitty day and you don’t feel like doing it, you won’t do it if you don’t have passion attached to it.
Number three allocates some time, even an hour a day, two hours a day. Most people spend two hours watching TV when it comes to longer months. It’s even longer. At least during the summer, you get out and walk, enjoy the sun, you go and do country walks and socially distance. We don’t have that opportunity now.
So what are you going to do with your week? This is the chance to completely change the way you structure your week plan ahead and go right Monday, Wednesday, Thursday I’m going to study this on two nights a week I’m going to chill out but the rest of the week I’ll study. Very, very important.
I cannot stress this enough the next month to 6 weeks might feel like a long time, but it will go quickly before you know it we’ll be into the New Year and suddenly there’s another announcement about extended lockdown. If you’re furloughed what are you going to do with your time?
This is a chance to actually create something, create memories, create a product or service or whatever it is right, keep journals.
Number four invest in you.
Go study a subject, pay for it. Free stuff is okay, but you get more depth when you pay. Invest in you because no one else is doing that right now your company isn’t investing in you, the government is definitely not investing in you, so the only person left is you to invest in you.
What about your kids?
My fiancée is amazing. She literally created a whole home-schooling environment now and she’s finding some incredible learning tools, which quite frankly make the schooling system look like, but we won’t go there.
That comes to number five, what about the kids? I have that same conversation with myself. Ask yourself the question during this lockdown, what could you do to create magic moments?
Emotional stress, emotional instability, the emotional turmoil going on in our children’s mind at the moment. Don’t underestimate it. Mental health issues are really major right now our kids do not have that same lifeblood expectancy they would have going into Christmas. Everything is being dampened. We’ve got to find a way to take it to another level.
What I’m saying is think of magic moments.
What magic moments can you learn to create for your children? My daughter wants to make some compost boxes for our garlic. I said great, let’s get the tools together and do that. These are projects which are hands-on.
Children need to be hands on right now. They do not need to be watching this stuff, which by the way flashes up subliminal messages all the time and social media now is designed to absolutely make them addictive.
This is going to be an incredible two months. Think of it now, right through to the New Year how can you make this amazing? November and December of 2020 when you look back and go, oh my god, do you remember that?
That was incredible. How can you make it amazing?
Dr Ro signing out see you on my next live.
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