Florist in Shop
getty
Stress and anxiety are at an all-time high. New terms like pandemic languishing from the New York Times and hitting the pandemic wall from the Washington Post have become a regular part of our lexicon. A recent study by Indeed showed that 67% of all workers believe that burnout has worsened.
Even as the “Chief Eternal Optimist,” a.k.a. CEO at my company, some days quarantine life feels too hard for even me to bear. Those are the days when I buy myself flowers.
I love placing flowers around my “office” (read: bedroom). Most of all, I love chatting with the older woman who runs a flower stand near my house, Camila. Recently, I decided to upgrade my normal $10 bouquet, telling Camila that I had hit a pandemic-induced wall.
I’m self-aware enough to know that I am lucky to have a job at a time when 80 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits since the start of the pandemic, and 8.5 million Americans are still unemployed. Those stats haven’t made the burnout feel any lighter.
The Indeed study showed that burnout feelings were actually highest among virtual workers. Long hours staring at a screen, combined with juggling childcare, and a lack of clarity around when, if ever, normalcy will resume, has taken its toll.
As I ranted to Camila about the monotony of spending all of my waking hours inside with a sleepless newborn, the florist turned her wizened face towards me and spoke.
“What are you watering?” Noting my quizzical look, Camila elaborated, “These flowers don’t grow on their own, they need water. What are you watering?”
Camila reminded me of a very critical lesson in perseverance: it’s not enough to just persist through a difficult task or time period, you have to actively cultivate things to look forward to. True perseverance means doing something hard while actively planting seeds for a better future, and nurturing those tender, young idea buds until they blossom.
It’s a lesson I’ve learned time and time again over the past decade of building a mission-driven business. Entrepreneurship is a rollercoaster, and there have been so many moments when I felt like everything was collapsing. Those are the moments when I force myself to focus on the buds, or things that I was looking forward to.
Last year when we were forced to do furloughs, I placed sticky notes on my computer saying “innovation”, “ecommerce”, and “climate-smart superfoods” to help myself focus on areas of excitement and growth instead of drowning in despair.
The same tool that has gotten me through so many entrepreneurial challenges can also get through more personal challenges like pandemic burnout. Now, every Friday, I spend a few minutes to “Rose, Thorn, Bud” my week for both my personal and professional life.
extreme closeup with backlight
getty
Rose are wins from the week, like a new customer or my baby sleeping through the night. Thorns are challenges, like manufacturing delays or sheer boredom with quarantining. Buds are where I spend the most time. Buds are the things I’m looking forward to, like the launch of a new product and an upcoming trip to see family post-vaccination.
It’s no surprise that my morning lesson in perseverance came from a minority woman small business owner. A report from Facebook and the Small Business Roundtable confirms what many of us already knew; women and minority-led small businesses were consistently hit harder by the pandemic. Quite simply, women and minority entrepreneurs have learned how to persevere and focus on the positives because they had to simply to survive.
I’ve taken lessons from sage female founders like Camila, mixed in my own experience, and am writing a series on how the lessons learned starting a business as a female founder can be applied to any life challenges. I call these lessons PEARLS. PEARLS are made up of Perseverance, Enthusiasm, Acceleration, Raising, Loss and Sanity. Follow along my Forbes column to see how each of these ideas can help you create the work and life that you want.
This morning I went back to Camila’s flower stand and purchased a bouquet solely of buds. My bedroom office is now budding with a beautiful future of possibilities.
